Symphony for Medical Coding: A Next-Generation Agentic System for Scalable and Explainable Medical Coding

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Edin, Joakim, Motzfeldt, Andreas, Flachs, Simon, Maaløe, Lars
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866908926384013312
author Edin, Joakim
Motzfeldt, Andreas
Flachs, Simon
Maaløe, Lars
author_facet Edin, Joakim
Motzfeldt, Andreas
Flachs, Simon
Maaløe, Lars
contents Medical coding translates free-text clinical documentation into standardized codes drawn from classification systems that contain tens of thousands of entries and are updated annually. It is central to billing, clinical research, and quality reporting, yet remains largely manual, slow, and error-prone. Existing automated approaches learn to predict a fixed set of codes from labeled data, thereby preventing adaptation to new codes or different coding systems without retraining on different data. They also provide no explanation for their predictions, limiting trust in safety-critical settings. We introduce Symphony for Medical Coding, a system that approaches the task the way expert human coders do: by reasoning over the clinical narrative with direct access to the coding guidelines. This design allows Symphony to operate across any coding system and to provide span-level evidence linking each predicted code to the text that supports it. We evaluate on two public benchmarks and three real-world datasets spanning inpatient, outpatient, emergency, and subspecialty settings across the United States and the United Kingdom. Symphony achieves state-of-the-art results across all settings, establishing itself as a flexible, deployment-ready foundation for automated clinical coding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_29709
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Symphony for Medical Coding: A Next-Generation Agentic System for Scalable and Explainable Medical Coding
Edin, Joakim
Motzfeldt, Andreas
Flachs, Simon
Maaløe, Lars
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Medical coding translates free-text clinical documentation into standardized codes drawn from classification systems that contain tens of thousands of entries and are updated annually. It is central to billing, clinical research, and quality reporting, yet remains largely manual, slow, and error-prone. Existing automated approaches learn to predict a fixed set of codes from labeled data, thereby preventing adaptation to new codes or different coding systems without retraining on different data. They also provide no explanation for their predictions, limiting trust in safety-critical settings. We introduce Symphony for Medical Coding, a system that approaches the task the way expert human coders do: by reasoning over the clinical narrative with direct access to the coding guidelines. This design allows Symphony to operate across any coding system and to provide span-level evidence linking each predicted code to the text that supports it. We evaluate on two public benchmarks and three real-world datasets spanning inpatient, outpatient, emergency, and subspecialty settings across the United States and the United Kingdom. Symphony achieves state-of-the-art results across all settings, establishing itself as a flexible, deployment-ready foundation for automated clinical coding.
title Symphony for Medical Coding: A Next-Generation Agentic System for Scalable and Explainable Medical Coding
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.29709