Automated Medical Coding Solutions
Skip manual work
Today medical coding is performed by specially trained nurses reading medical records and mapping their contents to sets of medical codes. The process of manual medical coding is labor-intensive, expensive, and prone to errors. There is a high demand to automate the process of medical coding. However, this is a difficult task because the medical domain is complex, electronic medical records contain a large amount of text, and provider terminology is varied.
Increase Assigned Code Accuracy
One of the benefits of a coding algorithm is that it is consistent across every document. As we all know, humans have their bad days, and/or get tired or lazy, or make silly mistakes when in a rush. With an algorithmic approach, the same output is always produced for the same input. If there is a need to fine-tune or modify how the algorithm chooses a code, this change can be made easily to the algorithm and reapplied to all documents. Idiosyncratic, “one-off” classification errors become systemic errors that are simple to rectify.
There is more to real-world usage than auto coding, however. The software can also identify erroneous code assignments by comparing its choice to the human-assigned code, and suggest codes a human might have missed, and identify problematic cases where the evidence for a chosen code appears weak. If you are working with a coding auditor, you can audit the auditor. Once the coding methodology is established, these repeated runs of the model across the data are essentially free.
