There’s been a bit of activity on the OpenEMR lists lately about the ability to import the ICD9 codes into the application. Apparently there are some Perl scripts which go out to a particular website, extract the data, and pull it down for the application to use. I’ve been wanting an excuse to try the Parallel.ForEach functionality in C# 4.0 and see how it works with threading. This provided a perfect opportunity to write a quick program which would go out, parse the site and data, and pull it down. In addition to the Parallel functions, I’ve also used the excellent HtmlAgilityPack to parse the data.
I’m not exactly sure about where the data ends up yet (I’m not as familiar with the OpenEMR data model as I should be), so all I have for now is a tab-delimited text file which simply contains the code “type” (all HCPCS in this case), ICD9 code, and its description. I’ll have to poke through the OpenEMR code and database in the coming days and see what is done with the data. Perhaps then I can create a SQL file that someone can then load in phpMyAdmin inside of OpenEMR.
The file is located here: hcpcs 2011 ICD9