The purpose of our project is to create a pipeline which automatically encodes death certificates using a NLP tool and identify deaths related to pneumonia and influenza which provides daily and/or weekly counts. We compared the new technique developed here with keyword searching and MMDS as exemplars of the easiest possible approach and the current "gold standard", respectively. The comparison of the techniques was done by calculating recall, precision, F-measure, positive predictive value and agreement (Cohen's Kappa).