Medical terminology server for the hospital of clinics of Paraguay

Abstract

The current process of searching for terminology for medical coding in health standards in the Hospital of Clinics of Paraguay, is done through coding manuals or through the internet of cell phones. This process takes a long time to be done during the medical consultation. The optimization of the current process would allow the search of encoded terminologies during the medical consultation, avoiding that the resident doctors have to perform this extra work after the workday. This work implements a medical terminology server through web services and using the text search engine library: Apache Lucene that is specialized in storage agility and data recovery. The implemented server also allows to perform successful searches of terminologies encoded in standards through friendly or familiar terms. The search time of coded terminologies using the implemented server was compared with the search time of the current process in the hospital of clinics using the internet of cell phones. Under these criteria, the terminology server responds up to 18 times faster than the current search process. In addition, it was made a comparison of the server against a search engine, called Metamorphosys. The terminology server implemented turned out to be quite competitive against Metamorphosys by presenting quite similar response times. Although both tools have a similar average response time, Metamorphosys presents some high atypical values in some algorithms that it presents as search options. The degree of satisfaction of the user in the use of the system was evaluated through a usability questionnaire called “System Usability Scale” (SUS). The evaluation rated the system as “Good” according to the Bangor.