[Electronic coding of death certificates].

About half of all German death certificates are processed electronically by regional statistical offices to select the underlying cause of death in accordance with the instructions from the World Health Organization. This paper illustrates electronic coding and its importance for cause of death statistics.The electronic coding kernel MUSE was added a few years ago to the international coding system Iris, which is maintained by the Iris Core Group.A new module assigns, as far as possible, ICD-10 codes to medical terms documented in death certificates. It takes into account syntactical specifics of the German language. In addition, automatic text correction is implemented. Unrecognised text parts are highlighted and coded manually.Despite these efforts, improvement of data quality is the greatest challenge of German cause-of-death statistics. All involved stakeholders (physicians, local health authorities, and regional statistical offices) can cope with this task by a common effort.The process of electronic coding provides valuable hints for improving the quality of death certificates. In future, the coding system could generate feedback to local health authorities indicating medical documentation problems.