Friday 27 June 2014

Insights On The Concept Of Hospital Coding

By Sherry Gross


All professions in the health care sector function within stipulated standards of health analysis.In appreciation of the need for uniformity, hospital coding was designed by international health organizations such as WHO. Medical coding refers to the way medical diagnostics, clinical procedures and health related matters are converted into commonly recognized code numbers by all countries.

These codes are useful in tracking ailments and other related health problems which include chronic ailments such as heart diseases and diabetes mellitus, contagious diseases like flu and norovirus. The procedural codes are useful in strategizing public health development, private insurance policy development and for workers compensation carriers.

Medical classifications are very useful in especially with regard to medicine and public health informatics such as therapeutic reactions and statistical analysis of diseases, pandemic outbreaks and epidemics. There exists international and national systems of classification. These codes appear in mainly two groupings, statistical classification and the nomenclature style.

The statistical system of classification puts the same clinical concerns into specific categories. This coding is designed to be small in range for easy mastery. Statistics are used internationally in the health sector in ways such as putting diseases into classes. One of the main categories is that of the circulatory diseases. Circulatory complications are placed in chapter 9 containing codes between 100 and 199. Additional subsections in the broad class of circulatory illnesses include supraventricular tachycardia which is also divided into auricular, nodal and proxysmal junctional tarcycardia. Another feature of the statistics method is that it provides room for other conditions which are not peculiar to any given codes and standards.

In nomenclature system, the listing and codes for every medical concept are done separately. For example, all notes related to the tachycardia defects are recorded separately from codes with other names. As such, the nomenclature method is unwieldy for compiling statistics in health.

These Coding systems that define concepts in healthcare are of various types. Diagnosis codes are used to determine a disease and its symptoms and they can also be used to measure morbidity and mortality amongst given patient groups. Procedural codes are numbers and alphanumeric codes used in identifying health interventions to be executed by medical professionals.

The main body of world class health, world health organization, administers several internationally adopted classification designs in order to supervise health related data for populations with regard to time and in compiling consistent national data. The family involves international classification and includes three major groupings on the basis of parameters of health which are designed by the organization and finally approved by the World International Health Assembly.

Healthcare coding is growing rampantly in the health industry and the demand for coders is very high. In most countries, this job is plentiful and the salaries mostly start at $30000 a year. Anyone considering to join a career in this particular healthcare line must have the two main basics of the field, education and certification. In addition, aspirants competence and preciseness are two qualities that would give one an upper hand in the job

An upcoming trend in this job is outsourcing coding work to third parties. With the evolution of technology, coding platforms will gradually increase and outsourcing will become more embraced in the industry.




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