A programmed implementation for automatically assigning medical codes (including
diagnosis, procedure, and level of service-i.e., evaluation and management (EM)-codes)
to computer readable physician notes using natural language processing. A system
allows hospitals, physician management groups, and medical billing companies to
automatically determine and assign the medical codes that are the basis of reimbursement
for medical services. The proposed implementation can be in place of human medical
coders who otherwise would be employed to determine and assign these codes. Implementation
requires only minor modifications to the traditional data-flow and allows for major
improvements in throughput and timeliness of billing. Further, the present scheme
enables the collection of other demographic and clinical information that resides
in physician notes, but that are currently too expensive and time consuming to
extract by means of a human workforce.
