By Kacie Geretz, Director of Growth Enablement
March 28, 2025
This guide helps revenue cycle leaders understand how autonomous medical coding technology integrates with existing revenue workflows and addresses key financial challenges facing healthcare organizations today. The following sections outline revenue enhancement capabilities, workflow optimizations, financial and operational ROI metrics, and tips for successful implementation.
Download the Revenue Cycle Leader's Guide to Autonomous Medical Coding as an easily scannable PDF:
Why Revenue Cycle Leaders are Turning to Autonomous Coding
Workflows with Autonomous Coding
Specialty-Specific Performance
Proven Financial and Operational ROI
Implementation Success Factors
Revenue cycle leaders are facing unprecedented financial and operational challenges that demand innovative solutions. As healthcare margins tighten and administrative costs climb, medical coding has emerged as a critical pressure point where transformation can drive significant financial improvement. Traditional manual coding approaches—reliant on expensive, error-prone manual processes —can no longer keep pace with today's complex healthcare environment.
Autonomous coding technology seamlessly integrates with existing healthcare systems to create more efficient and consistent coding processes. The following workflow diagram provides a simple, high-level representation of coding workflows once an autonomous coding solution has been implemented.
Note: Coding scope and supported code sets may vary by autonomous medical coding vendor
Different medical specialties present unique coding challenges and opportunities for automation based on documentation patterns and case complexity. Understanding specialty-specific automation rates (the percentage of total encounters coded by the autonomous medical coding solution) helps revenue cycle leaders set realistic expectations and identify the highest-impact areas for implementation.
SPECIALTY | TYPICAL AUTOMATION RATE |
Emergency Department |
60-70% |
Outpatient Surgery |
50-65% |
Primary Care |
55-75% |
Radiology |
70-85% |
These rates typically increase over time as machine learning algorithms process more data. Autonomous medical coding solutions may route encounters to manual coding teams in certain cases, such as:
Note: Automation metrics represent industry averages and may vary by vendor, implementation approach, and documentation quality.
Autonomous coding solutions deliver measurable financial and operational benefits that address the core challenges facing revenue cycle leaders today. Real-world implementations demonstrate revenue acceleration, increased charge capture, and significant coding cost reduction.
Successful implementation of autonomous coding technology requires generating buy-in from key stakeholders and thoughtful vendor evaluation. Following some of the best practices and asking the questions listed below can prove crucial to achieving financial and operation ROI with autonomous coding solutions.
Next Steps: Schedule a discovery call to discuss your specific revenue cycle management challenges and explore how autonomous coding can transform your department.
Kacie Geretz, RHIA, CPMA, CPC, CCA is the Director of Growth Enablement at Nym, where she aligns Nym’s product roadmap with the evolving needs of health system partners and serves as the externally-facing expert on Nym’s autonomous medical coding engine. A graduate of The Ohio State University’s Health Information Management program, Kacie brings deep expertise across the revenue cycle—having led revenue integrity programs, built managed care contracting and credentialing infrastructure, and driven denials and A/R process improvement initiatives. She is passionate about advancing healthcare automation and regularly shares insights on coding innovation and RCM transformation.