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Comment by mortov | Hacker News Reader

Are you saying you know this for a fact or are you speculating a benign explanation without any genuine knowledge of this particular case (by referring to the keep calm t-shirts which are unrelated and irrelevant to this situation) ?

edit: Plus I've never heard of "rape" being a diagnosed medical condition - why would that be in a list of conditions ? I find your 'explanation' quite troubling.

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I'm saying this is the most likely explanation. I should have been more clear on this point. Too late to edit, unfortunately.

Incidentally, here is a cached list of the things they sell (the site is now not displaying them):

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dI3aEj0...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8T2YX7h...

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:aRARHll...

I stand by my claim that they took a list of medical billing codes or something like that. Really, you think a human decided to compile a list of "Bioterrorism sufferers", "Smallpox sufferers", "Bites and Stings sufferers" or "Polio Sufferers"?

However, I'm now convinced their first step was less sophisticated than I suggested. I think they didn't take a list of users joined against billing codes, I think they just took a list of billing codes.

> edit: Plus I've never heard of "rape" being a diagnosed medical condition - why would that be in a list of conditions ? I find your 'explanation' quite troubling

The SNOMED CT coding system has an incredible number of coded clinical terms. Including rape:

http://phinvads.cdc.gov/vads/http:/phinvads.cdc.gov/vads/Vie...

The condition it lists in your example is "Rape trauma syndrome" - that would be an acceptable medical diagnosis as it is the trauma associated with being raped (and medical support and intervention could be necessary to deal with this). The rape itself is not a medical condition, and I think that definition listed makes that clear.

I still would not like the idea of a list of rape trauma victims being sold as that almost by definition would add to the trauma they have suffered if they knew this happened.

Sorry, I should have dug a bit deeper for the exact code. SNOMED CT covers non-clinical terms along with clinical ones. It covers tons and tons of 'stuff' from measurements, drugs, finding areas, diagnoses, substances, social contexts, foods, etc. The point was to create a coding system which captured more than just clinical information.

SNOMED CT is used to build 'clinical statements' which are combinations of SNOMED CT-terms to help build a more in-depth patient record. Many of those terms are non-clinical, but can be used in combination with clinical-terms.

Here's 'Victim of Statutory Rape': http://bioportal.bioontology.org/ontologies/SNOMEDCT?p=class...

I run a company that develops a web-based medical practice management system. We use NLP techniques combined with the SNOMED CT database (and others) to extract clinical-statements from all text inputted against a medical record. Whether it's a complaint, treatment, diagnosis, or even an email to the patient. So I don't doubt for a second that there are other systems out there that do a similar thing and have auto-associated patients with various clinical and non-clinical terms.

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