dimanche 29 juin 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 used to track ailments and related health issues which include chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus and heart diseases, contagious diseases like norovirus, flu and athletes foot. These procedures are useful to the development of public health programs, private insurance company policy development and in workers compensation carrier.

These classification identities are used in most areas of medicine, pharmacies, in public health as well as informatics analysis in medicine . They include statistical analysis of diseases, therapy reactions, reimbursement of diagnostic groups, decisions for support systems and surveillance on epidemic and pandemic outbreaks. Basically, the main classes in classification systems are the country specific standards and international standards.

In the statistical system, similar clinical concepts are grouped together into categories. The categories are limited to maintain a small size altogether. Some of these are those used by International statistical classification for diseases and related problems of health. For instance, international statistics place circulatory system diseases as chapter 1, with codes from 100 to 199. One of the code titles under this class is supra-ventricular tachycardia under which we also have some clinical concepts like the proxysmal junction tachycardia, nodal tachycardia and auricular tachycardia, among others. Another distinguishing feature of statistical classification is seen in the provision for unspecified and extra conditions that may not be placed in any particular category.

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.

World Health Organization has set several universally endorsed classification structures to facilitate surveillance on health related data among populations and also to compile national data that is consistent. This family, in international classification, includes the three major classification groupings on the basis of health parameters prepared by world health organization and approved by World 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 is outsourcing coding tasks to third parties. As technology evolves day by day, coding platforms will emerge and the outsourcing model will become more established in the industry.




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