Clinical coding underpins every health system. It drives funding, informs service planning, and delivers critical insights into quality and safety. Yet coding teams worldwide are facing mounting pressures that threaten the sustainability of coding operations: a shrinking pool of skilled coders, escalating demand for timely coded data, and increasingly complex documentation sources. These factors are making it increasingly challenging to maintain coding services at both scale and quality – placing strain on teams and risking delays, inconsistencies, and missed opportunities for improvement.
At CHIMA 2025, Beamtree will showcase progress on Autonomous Coding – our end-to-end, “no-touch” coding solution designed to support health systems facing growing complexity and workforce pressures.
Beamtree’s Autonomous Coding solution uses artificial intelligence to ingest, interpret, and code clinical documentation across multiple ICD versions and data formats, including EMRs, scanned records, and PDFs. The solution is built on RippleDown, a curated expert learning system that enables clinical coders to safely apply their expertise at scale.
Outputs are validated against human-coded records to ensure accuracy, and the system is designed to work alongside existing workflows – supporting coders rather than replacing them. By reducing manual burden and accelerating turnaround times, Autonomous Coding allows teams to focus on complex, high-value cases while improving consistency and data quality.
Beamtree’s early trials across three countries demonstrated strong performance across a wide range of clinical scenarios. The solution was tested on diverse data sources—including full EMRs, oncology records, scanned PDFs, and handwritten forms—and consistently delivered accurate coding outcomes. These trials confirmed the system’s ability to handle both high-volume and complex episodes, with performance improving as rules were refined and validated against human-coded records.
Building on these outcomes, pilots are now underway in Australia, the UK, and Canada, targeting high-volume, lower-complexity episodes. These projects are progressing towards live implementation, with autonomous coded data now being tested and integrated into production systems across three ICD versions: ICD-10-AM, ICD-10-UK, and ICD-10-CA.
The solution combines optical character recognition (OCR), rule-building, and comparison tools to continuously refine outputs. Each step is undertaken in collaboration with local health information teams, ensuring that coders retain oversight and determine when episodes are ready to move into the autonomous pathway.
Autonomous Coding is not designed to replace coders – it is built to empower them. By automating routine, repeatable cases, health services can reallocate skilled coders to complex episodes, improving both efficiency and workforce sustainability.
As Beamtree shares these updates at CHIMA 2025, the message is clear: autonomous solutions are no longer theoretical. With proven trials, live pilots, and early implementations underway, the future of coding is becoming a reality – one that promises greater accuracy, speed, and resilience for health systems globally.
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