The Origin of Medical Coding

What is medical coding and who are medical coders? Well, everyone does know about the importance of accurate medical data while providing quality healthcare service. The professional medical coder is one of the main persons involved in the capturing of this critical and accurate medical data that needs to be delivered in time. Computerization of medical billing process is done only after medically coded details specify all the various processes / procedures/ therapies/ undergone by the patient at the health care provider's premises.

During medical coding all verbal descriptions of diseases, injuries, and procedures are converted into numeric or alphanumeric designations. How did the medical coding originate? Coding was originally performed to classify mortality (cause of death), data on death certificates, besides being used to classify morbidity and procedural data. Since the early 1970's, the HCFA (Health Care Financing Administration) has asked the American Medical Association (AMA) to work with physicians of every specialty to determine appropriate definitions for the procedure codes and to try to determine accurate reimbursement amounts for each code. Such type of coding is very useful especially as it helps us today to get easy access to medical records by diagnoses and procedures so that in can be used in,

Hospitals/clinics etc


Research work


Education

The federal government introduced The Medicare Prospective Payment System (PPS) in October, 1983, for better management of medical care. Each patient was classified into a DRG (Diagnosis Related Group) depending on the information from the Medical Record that appears on the bill. Under PPS, hospitals are paid a pre-determined rate for each Medicare admission. Since then there has been a great deal more emphasis placed on medical coding.

At present assigning of medical codes is the backbone for reimbursement of claims for Medicare patients. Codes are given for diagnoses, services, and procedures provided. Thus healthcare providers today have to comply with different medical coding guidelines.

The author of this article is Ricci Mathew of Outsource Strategies International (OSI), a US based company that offers services in Search Engine Optimization, SEM, PPC advertising for clients across the US.

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