Code Like Humans: A Multi-Agent Solution for Medical Coding

Andreas Geert Motzfeldt, Joakim Edin, Casper L. Christensen, Christian Hardmeier, Lars Maaløe, Anna Rogers


Abstract
In medical coding, experts map unstructured clinical notes to alphanumeric codes for diagnoses and procedures. We introduce ‘Code Like Humans’: a new agentic framework for medical coding with large language models. It implements official coding guidelines for human experts, and it is the first solution that can support the full ICD-10 coding system (+70K labels). It achieves the best performance to date on rare diagnosis codes. Fine-tuned discriminative classifiers retain an advantage for high-frequency codes, to which they are limited. Towards future work, we also contribute an analysis of system performance and identify its ‘blind spots’ (codes that are systematically undercoded).
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-emnlp.1231
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22612–22627
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1231/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andreas Geert Motzfeldt, Joakim Edin, Casper L. Christensen, Christian Hardmeier, Lars Maaløe, and Anna Rogers. 2025. Code Like Humans: A Multi-Agent Solution for Medical Coding. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025, pages 22612–22627, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Code Like Humans: A Multi-Agent Solution for Medical Coding (Motzfeldt et al., Findings 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-emnlp.1231.pdf
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