Automatic SNOMED coding

Medical coding has become an important new industry that has originated from the field of medical informatics. Automatic coding of specimens has emerged as a way of relieving hospitals from the cost of paying professional coders and for achieving uniform coding for all specimens. Unfortunately, automatic coding, like manual coding, has numerous pitfalls. Further, the coding algorithms employed by manufacturers of automatic coders are typically proprietary. We have developed a method for automatic coding of pathology reports. Using this public domain autocoder, we have previously demonstrated that automatic SNOMED coding was superior to manual coding in several measurable categories, including the overall number of codes generated and the number of distinct code entities provided. In this report, we describe an algorithm that executes this strategy in the M-Technology environment.