Patent ID: 8589424

Claim:
A medical-code translation system comprising: a computer system that includes a processor, one or more electronic memories, and one or more mass-storage devices; a medical-concept database stored within, or accessible to, the computer system; and computer instructions that control operation of the medical-code-translation system, encoded in one or more of the one or more electronic memories and one or more mass-storage devices to receive and store, in memory, a source codeword from a source medical code, identify candidate target codewords of a target medical-concept code, using indications of medical concepts stored in the medical-concept database, that are associated with at least one medical concept with which the source code is associated, remove, from the candidate target codewords, excluded codewords to generate a set of remaining candidate target codewords; and select a target codeword corresponding to the source codeword that, when compared to the source codeword in a matching operation, generates a comparison metric that indicates a degree of matching with the source code greater than the degree of matching indicated by the comparison metrics generated for each of the other remaining candidate target codewords in matching operations.