Internship project: AI-enabled clinical coding for a large general hospital

Opportunity

Clinical coding translates records from healthcare into standardised codes used for data reporting, service planning and hospital funding. Automated coding promises to help coders prioritise work, clear backlogs and focus on complex cases that require human expertise. Natural language processing approaches use machine learning to predict codes based on discharge summaries. However, they are generally evaluated on US data and involve assumptions that may not reflect workflows.

During this project, the intern will analyse real healthcare data to contribute to our understanding of design considerations, data characteristics and AI engineering for AI-enabled clinical coding at a large general hospital.

Project Objectives

• Describe the unique characteristics of Australian clinical data that may need to be considered when applying AI for clinical coding
• Apply an AI model to clinical data to determine its suitability for supporting AI-enabled clinical coding
• Develop recommendations on how AI-enabled clinical coding may be implemented into healthcare workflows