An End-to-End Natural Language Processing Application for Prediction of Medical Case Coding Complexity: Algorithm Development and Validation

BACKGROUND: Medical coding is the process that converts clinical documentation into standard medical codes. Codes are used for several key purposes in a hospital (eg, insurance reimbursement and performance analysis); therefore, their optimization is crucial. With the rapid growth of natural language processing technologies, several solutions based on artificial intelligence have been proposed to aid in medical coding by automatically suggesting relevant codes for clinical documents. However, their effectiveness is still limited to simple cases, and it is not yet clear how much value they can bring in improving coding efficiency and accuracy. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to bring more efficiency to the coding process to improve the selection of codes by medical coders. To achieve this, we developed an innovative multimodal machine learning–based solution that, instead of predicting codes, detects the degree of coding complexity before coding is performed. The notion of coding complexity was used to better dispatch work among medical coders to eventually minimize errors and improve throughput. METHODS: To train and evaluate our approach, we collected 2060 cases rated by coders in terms of coding complexity from 1 (simplest) to 4 (most complex). We asked 2 expert coders to rate 3.01% (62/2060) of the cases as the gold standard. The agreements between experts were used as benchmarks for model evaluation. A case contains both clinical text and patient metadata from the hospital electronic health record. We extracted both text features and metadata features, then concatenated and fed them into several machine learning models. Finally, we selected 2 models. The first used cross-validated training on 1751 cases and testing on 309 cases aiming to assess the predictive power of the proposed approach and its generalizability. The second model was trained on 1998 cases and tested on the gold standard to validate the best model performance against human benchmarks. RESULTS: Our first model achieved a macro–F(1)-score of 0.51 and an accuracy of 0.59 on classifying the 4-scale complexity. The model distinguished well between the simple (combined complexity 1-2) and complex (combined complexity 3-4) cases with a macro–F(1)-score of 0.65 and an accuracy of 0.71. Our second model achieved 61% agreement with experts’ ratings and a macro–F(1)-score of 0.62 on the gold standard, whereas the 2 experts had a 66% (41/62) agreement ratio with a macro–F(1)-score of 0.67. CONCLUSIONS: We propose a multimodal machine learning approach that leverages information from both clinical text and patient metadata to predict the complexity of coding a case in the precoding phase. By integrating this model into the hospital coding system, distribution of cases among coders can be done automatically with performance comparable with that of human expert coders, thus improving coding efficiency and accuracy at scale.