INTRODUCTION
Tracking and trending rates of injuries and illnesses classified as musculoskeletal disorders caused by ergonomic risk factors such as overexertion and repetitive motion (MSDs) and slips, trips, or falls (STFs) in different industry sectors is of high interest to many researchers. Unfortunately, identifying the cause of injuries and illnesses in large datasets such as workers' compensation systems often requires reading and coding the free form accident text narrative for potentially millions of records.
METHOD
To alleviate the need for manual coding, this paper describes and evaluates a computer auto-coding algorithm that demonstrated the ability to code millions of claims quickly and accurately by learning from a set of previously manually coded claims.
CONCLUSIONS
The auto-coding program was able to code claims as a musculoskeletal disorders, STF or other with approximately 90% accuracy.
IMPACT ON INDUSTRY
The program developed and discussed in this paper provides an accurate and efficient method for identifying the causation of workers' compensation claims as a STF or MSD in a large database based on the unstructured text narrative and resulting injury diagnoses. The program coded thousands of claims in minutes. The method described in this paper can be used by researchers and practitioners to relieve the manual burden of reading and identifying the causation of claims as a STF or MSD. Furthermore, the method can be easily generalized to code/classify other unstructured text narratives.
[1]
Daphne Koller,et al.
Hierarchically Classifying Documents Using Very Few Words
,
1997,
ICML.
[2]
M Lehto,et al.
Bayesian methods: a useful tool for classifying injury narratives into cause groups
,
2009,
Injury Prevention.
[3]
Pedro M. Domingos,et al.
On the Optimality of the Simple Bayesian Classifier under Zero-One Loss
,
1997,
Machine Learning.
[4]
Van Rijsbergen,et al.
A theoretical basis for the use of co-occurence data in information retrieval
,
1977
.
[5]
Fabrizio Sebastiani,et al.
Machine learning in automated text categorization
,
2001,
CSUR.
[6]
M Lehto,et al.
A combined Fuzzy and Naïve Bayesian strategy can be used to assign event codes to injury narratives
,
2011,
Injury Prevention.
[7]
Mark R Lehto,et al.
Computerized coding of injury narrative data from the National Health Interview Survey.
,
2004,
Accident; analysis and prevention.