MedCodER: A Generative AI Assistant for Medical Coding

Krishanu Das Baksi, Elijah Soba, John J Higgins, Ravi Saini, Jaden Wood, Jane Cook, Jack I Scott, Nirmala Pudota, Tim Weninger, Edward Bowen, Sanmitra Bhattacharya


Abstract
Medical coding standardizes clinical data but is both time-consuming and error-prone. Traditional Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods struggle with automating coding due to the large label space, lengthy text inputs, and the absence of supporting evidence annotations that justify code selection. Recent advancements in Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) offer promising solutions to these challenges. In this work, we introduce MedCodER, an emerging Generative AI framework for automatic medical coding that leverages extraction, retrieval, and re-ranking techniques as core components. MedCodER achieves a micro-F1 score of 0.62 on International Classification of Diseases (ICD) code prediction, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, we present a new dataset containing medical records annotated with disease diagnoses, ICD codes, and supporting evidence texts (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.13308316). Ablation tests confirm that MedCodER’s performance depends on the integration of each of its aforementioned components, as performance declines when these components are evaluated in isolation.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-industry.37
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Weizhu Chen, Yi Yang, Mohammad Kachuee, Xue-Yong Fu
Venue:
NAACL
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
449–459
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-industry.37/
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Cite (ACL):
Krishanu Das Baksi, Elijah Soba, John J Higgins, Ravi Saini, Jaden Wood, Jane Cook, Jack I Scott, Nirmala Pudota, Tim Weninger, Edward Bowen, and Sanmitra Bhattacharya. 2025. MedCodER: A Generative AI Assistant for Medical Coding. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 3: Industry Track), pages 449–459, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
MedCodER: A Generative AI Assistant for Medical Coding (Baksi et al., NAACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2025.naacl-industry.37.pdf