AUTOMATIC ICD-10 CODING USING PRESCRIBED DRUGS DATA.

This article discusses the emerging trends and challenges related to automatic clinical coding. We introduce an automatic coding system, which assigns short ICD-10 codes (restricted to the first three symbols, which define the category of the disease) based only on drugs prescribed to patients. We show that even with limited input data, the accuracy levels are comparable to those achieved by entry-level clinical coders as depicted by Seyed Nouraei et al.1 We also examine the standard method for performance estimation and speculate that the actual accuracy of our coding system is even higher than estimated.