PAS-Code: iOS App with Mobile Access to the International Classified Disease and Drug Databases for Health Informatics & Precision Medicine: PAS-Code with ICD and NDC

Abstract

Today, we stand on the threshold of the new medical revolution, and learning to read the code of life, and this revolution offers big hope to people suffering from all kinds of diseases. The complexity and variability in disease classification is a great challenge to overcome. Disease classification is routinely composed of healthcare units streaming data from multiple sources simultaneously e.g., pathology, genomics, imaging, and electrophysiology etc. To efficiently fathom the wealth of healthcare, there is a crucial need to generate appropriate disease-treatment annotation repositories accessed through modern technologies. One platform that has proven to be an efficient tool in several areas including healthcare, is the multi-purpose mobile computing devices e.g., smart phone and tablet computer. Our focus here was to develop a mobile application with a comprehensive database for efficient management and access to International Classification of Diseases (ICD) and National Drug Code (NDC) for epidemiology, health management, clinical support, and scientific research. Innovative and smart systems are necessary to improve the quality and transition of healthcare by understanding heterogeneous healthcare and related data. In this manuscript, we present PAS-Code, an iOS app developed with Swift and PHP scripting that uses a MySQL server database, which includes over 80,000 ICDs maintained by the World Health Organization and over 123,000 NDCs approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. It enables users worldwide to install the application on Apple mobile devices and search for medical classified codes, disease, drugs, and related information such as, signs and symptoms, abnormal findings, complaints, social circumstances, and external causes of injury. PAS-Code is an exclusively academic application founded on the clinical, scientific, and modern technology premise to support healthcare and enable scientific data retrieval using efficient mobile-based tools. It has the potential to assist clinical researchers by providing enhanced exposure to ICD and NDC with greater visibility and easy browsing. These set of codes are highly significant at every level of healthcare.