Automated Drug Coding Using Artificial Intelligence: An Evaluation of WHODrug Koda on Adverse Event Reports.

Introduction: Coding medicinal products described on adverse event (AE) reports to specific entries in standardised drug dictionaries, such as WHODrug Global, is a time-consuming step in case processing activities despite its potential for automation. Many organisations are already partially automating drug coding using text-processing methods and synonym lists, however addressing challenges such as misspellings, abbreviations or ambiguous trade names requires more advanced methods. WHODrug Koda is a drug coding engine using text-processing algorithms, built-in coding rules and machine learning to code drug verbatims to WHODrug Global.