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.
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.