Ontologically driven procedure coding

A computer system comprising:

• a natural language engine executing on a computer processor, the natural language engine configured to:
• segment narrative text of clinical documentation based on boundaries defined in the clinical documentation to provide segmented narrative text;
• sequence words of the narrative text, based on the segmented narrative text to provide sequenced words;
• map the sequenced words to one or more semantic objects of a plurality of semantic objects of an ontology that defines classes of the plurality of semantic objects corresponding to a multi-axial coding scheme;
• convert the semantic objects to a plurality of characters;
• infer an additional semantic object of the plurality of semantic objects based on the one or more semantic objects, wherein the additional semantic object is not mapped to the one or more of the sequenced words of the segmented text;
• infer an additional character based on the additional semantic object;
• based on the multi-axial coding scheme, position each of the plurality of characters and the additional character into different respective slots of a medical code;
• and
• provide the medical code having the plurality of characters and the additional character.

A non-transitory computer-readable storage medium having program code embedded thereon, the program code executable on a natural language processor of a computer system to:

• segment narrative text of clinical documentation based on boundaries defined in the clinical documentation to provide segmented narrative text;
• sequence words of the narrative text, based on the segmented narrative text to provide sequenced words;
• map one or more of the sequenced words to a first semantic object of a plurality of semantic objects of an ontology that defines classes of the plurality of semantic objects corresponding to a multi-axial coding scheme;
• provide a first character based on the first semantic object;
• infer a second semantic object of the plurality of semantic objects based on the first semantic object, wherein the second semantic object is not mapped to the one or more of the sequenced words of the segmented text;
• infer a second character based on the second semantic object;
• position the first character into one slot of a medical code and the second character into another slot of the medical code based on the multi-axial coding scheme;
• and
• provide the medical code having at least the first character and the second character.