  Transformer models have achieved great success across many NLP problems.
However, previous studies in automated ICD coding concluded that these models
fail to outperform some of the earlier solutions such as CNN-based models. In
this paper we challenge this conclusion. We present a simple and scalable
method to process long text with the existing transformer models such as BERT.
We show that this method significantly improves the previous results reported
for transformer models in ICD coding, and is able to outperform one of the
prominent CNN-based methods.
