LUCID: a semi-automated ICD-9 encoding system.

The natural language approach to diagnosis encoding will certainly become a widespread technique during the second half of this decade. Accessing standard codes by numbers and keywords will be more and more considered a loss of time and efficiency. We present a demonstration of a natural language based encoding system for ICD, called LUCID, which considerably alleviates the burden of coding with ICD classification and enhances the quality of the encoded list of diagnoses. This tool, delivered on a PC platform, is very convivial and provides a versatile interface to any existing application based on Microsoft Windows standards.