Artificial Intelligence and Clinical Coding: towards more EHR usable data

Digital Health solutions aim to improve and support the provision of evidence based healthcare services. Evidence based means mainly Data based. Clinical coding is the process to transform medical records, which in many cases are free texts and medical notes written by healthcare professionals, into structured codes that could be used for data analysis. In a recent article Dong et al., review recent experiences and current literature on the use of AI and Natural Language Processing techniques for automated clinical coding. The authors analyze the complexity of this problem, as well as our current methodological approaches. Furthermore, they discuss the key challenges, both technical and organizational, and propose directions for research and implementation. Although, many experiences discussed are based on the UK NHS, the implications are relevant for almost all healthcare systems.
 
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