Struck By A Duck: The Hidden Language Of Healthcare And AI

Medical coding translates visits, diagnoses and procedures into standardized codes used for payment and research.

The American ICD system contains over 70,000 codes, including unusual examples like a code for being struck by a duck.

Corti's Symphony treats coding as a multi-step reasoning task and claims over 25% better accuracy than general models while providing evidence for each code.

Modern coding now records social context such as homelessness and unemployment, which affects how health systems assess risk.

Hospitals spend billions fixing miscoded or denied claims, and many AI models reproduce human omissions when trained on existing data.