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New paper: Automated clinical coding: what, why, and where we are?

7 November 2022

IHI's Dr Honghan Wu and wider team publish in the npj Digital Medicine magazine.

Image is mostly writing in black font on white background of the paper subject. There is an image of a robot head to denote the automated coding system.

Honghan and team illustrate how natural language processing (NLP) can help improve the efficiency of clinical coding in healthcare, by assigning ICD / SNOMED codes to hospital visits. This work aims to improve what is currently a very inefficient and erroneous process in the NHS.

The paper summarises developments of the symbolic, knowledge-based approach and deep learning based approach. Considering the ever changing coding standards and guidelines, the knowledge-based approach is much needed and the potential yet to be fully realised.

There were seven challenges discussed, and among them: missing high-quality benchmarking datasets; using heterogenous, incomplete and noisy sources; and learning from low resources.

Read the full paper