EPIDEMIOLOGY AND HEALTH DATA INSIGHTS
Original Article
Oct 26, 2026 5 2

Reproducible Coding of Admission Complaints in Pediatric Rehabilitation: A Dictionary-Based Study

Syed Gufran Sadiq Zaidi 1 * ,
Saule Karibzhanova 1
1 Nazarbayev University, School of Medicine, Astana, Kazakhstan* Corresponding Author
Epidemiology and Health Data Insights, 2(5), 2026, ehdi059, https://doi.org/10.63946/ehdi/19672
Publication date: Oct 26, 2026
Full Text (PDF)

ABSTRACT

Background: Family-reported complaints at admission shape rehabilitation planning, but they are usually stored as free text and are rarely analyzed.
Methods: We analyzed the admission complaint text of 318 children admitted to a national pediatric rehabilitation center in one admission course (22 August–8 September 2025), written in Russian in discharge summaries. We coded the text into ten complaint categories with a rule-based dictionary, compared the coding with hand coding of 209 children by a single clinician (including a test set of 40 children not used to build the dictionary), compared the categories by diagnosis group with permutation tests, and explored complaint profiles with non-negative matrix factorization of lemmatized text.
Results: On the test set the dictionary agreed with the clinician’s hand coding on 98.3% of category decisions (95% CI 97.0 to 99.5%). Speech and language complaints were most frequent (73%), followed by motor (59%) and social and behavioral (36%) complaints. Motor complaints were recorded in 98% of children with cerebral palsy, and 61% of these children also had speech or language complaints. Categories differed by diagnosis (all q<0.05 except learning and memory), but motor complaints were also frequent in Down syndrome and other diagnoses. Three complaint profiles were found.
Conclusions: Family-reported complaints in routine records can be coded reproducibly, and speech and language concerns were frequent in children admitted for motor disorders. Agreement was measured against a single clinician and may overestimate agreement with other clinicians.

KEYWORDS

Parents Child Neurodevelopmental Disorders Rehabilitation Natural Language Processing Data Accuracy

CITATION (Vancouver)

Zaidi SGS, Karibzhanova S. Reproducible Coding of Admission Complaints in Pediatric Rehabilitation: A Dictionary-Based Study. Epidemiology and Health Data Insights. 2026;2(5):ehdi059. https://doi.org/10.63946/ehdi/19672
APA
Zaidi, S. G. S., & Karibzhanova, S. (2026). Reproducible Coding of Admission Complaints in Pediatric Rehabilitation: A Dictionary-Based Study. Epidemiology and Health Data Insights, 2(5), ehdi059. https://doi.org/10.63946/ehdi/19672
Harvard
Zaidi, S. G. S., and Karibzhanova, S. (2026). Reproducible Coding of Admission Complaints in Pediatric Rehabilitation: A Dictionary-Based Study. Epidemiology and Health Data Insights, 2(5), ehdi059. https://doi.org/10.63946/ehdi/19672
AMA
Zaidi SGS, Karibzhanova S. Reproducible Coding of Admission Complaints in Pediatric Rehabilitation: A Dictionary-Based Study. Epidemiology and Health Data Insights. 2026;2(5), ehdi059. https://doi.org/10.63946/ehdi/19672
Chicago
Zaidi, Syed Gufran Sadiq, and Saule Karibzhanova. "Reproducible Coding of Admission Complaints in Pediatric Rehabilitation: A Dictionary-Based Study". Epidemiology and Health Data Insights 2026 2 no. 5 (2026): ehdi059. https://doi.org/10.63946/ehdi/19672
MLA
Zaidi, Syed Gufran Sadiq et al. "Reproducible Coding of Admission Complaints in Pediatric Rehabilitation: A Dictionary-Based Study". Epidemiology and Health Data Insights, vol. 2, no. 5, 2026, ehdi059. https://doi.org/10.63946/ehdi/19672

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