Looking for ICD10 API

Question

Any body knows of a good ICD10 API to do diagnostic code lookups that can recommend. I am currently building a simple app to tag patients with medical condition and the idea is to have a lookup API where one can type asthma for example and get back all the different ICD10 codes for asthma

Answer 1

There is a project called "Unified Medical Language System (UMLS)", funded by NIH and apparently they are working on a RESTful Web API for medical terms.

https://documentation.uts.nlm.nih.gov/rest/home.html

I didn't work with their API yest and the samples I am seeing on their website sounds like they are more SNOMED-CT oriented.

The option I would go for is to get the whole ICD-10-CM from CMS and build my own Web API.

https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Coding/ICD10/2016-ICD-10-CM-and-GEMs.html

Answer 2

you can check the full documentation from WHO https://icd.who.int/icdapi

Answer 3

My R package, icd converts ICD-9 and ICD-10 codes to descriptions, in addition to its main function of finding comorbidities. Documentation at https://jackwasey.github.io/icd/ , and code at https://github.com/jackwasey/icd . It does this using the function explain_code. It currently uses ICD-10-CM, i.e. the USA billing adapted ICD-10 code set, which in general is more specific than the canonical WHO version, but does have some areas of less detail.

E.g. WHO ICD-10 has HIV disease resulting in Pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia as a subdivision for HIV infection, whereas ICD-10-CM just has HIV. On the other hand, ICD-10-CM has Sucked into jet engine, subsequent encounter whereas the WHO is happy with the terribly vague: Person on ground injured in air transport accident.

The volume of data for all the descriptions is not very high, just handful of megabytes, so although an API may seem convenient, you might consider just having all the data and not having to ping some random server.

Answer 4

I'm going to assume you're ignoring all of the usual stuff around variations of spelling of medical terms, proper terms vs. colloquialisms, labels vs. descriptions, etc. that get to be a pain with term / code finders.

If you want to use a hosted option and are OK with the terms of use, you could use UMLS (https://uts.nlm.nih.gov/home.html#apidocumentation). It's a great resource, but the use case you're describing isn't necessarily what it's intended to address.

Personally - and I usually don't like to roll my own stuff - I'd consider doing your own thing. You could do something focused on your needs and tailor it to any specific behaviors you might want (like preferring specific codes based on an organization - EX: billing preference). You could also probably make it far, far more ... perky ... and address short forms of terms (EX: synonyms like "DVT") or misspellings ("asthma" vs. "athsma"). If you go that route, I'd suggest considering getting your hands on the ICD-10 code info and then mashing it into Elastic Search. You could extend the data by mixing it with other info and really make it hum. And Elastic is wicked fast.

That's just my $0.02, though.