Aligning AI Research with the Needs of Clinical Coding Workflows: Eight Recommendations Based on US Data Analysis and Critical Review
Yidong Gan, Maciej Rybinski, Ben Hachey, Jonathan K. Kummerfeld
Abstract
Clinical coding is crucial for healthcare billing and data analysis. Manual clinical coding is labour-intensive and error-prone, which has motivated research towards full automation of the process. However, our analysis, based on US English electronic health records and automated coding research using these records, shows that widely used evaluation methods are not aligned with real clinical contexts. For example, evaluations that focus on the top 50 most common codes are an oversimplification, as there are thousands of codes used in practice. This position paper aims to align AI coding research more closely with practical challenges of clinical coding. Based on our analysis, we offer eight specific recommendations, suggesting ways to improve current evaluation methods. Additionally, we propose new AI-based methods beyond automated coding, suggesting alternative approaches to assist clinical coders in their workflows.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{gan-etal-2025-aligning,
title = "Aligning {AI} Research with the Needs of Clinical Coding Workflows: Eight Recommendations Based on {US} Data Analysis and Critical Review",
author = "Gan, Yidong and
Rybinski, Maciej and
Hachey, Ben and
Kummerfeld, Jonathan K.",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.45/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.45",
pages = "909--922",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}