Insights On The Concept Of Hospital Coding

By Sherry Gross


All professions and activities in provision of healthcare are subject to the stipulated systems of universal health management.Hospital coding is extremely esential and acts as a major health management tool. It refers to how medical diagnostics, procedures and other health concerns are converted into universally recognized code numbers.

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.

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 a nomenclature system, there exists separate lists and codes for every clinical concept in health. Considering the previous example, each of the listed tachycardia bears its own code. Thus, in this respect, nomenclature is regarded as ineffective in compiling health statistics.

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.

The healthcare classification jobs are growing very fast and more coders and health analyst are demanded each day. In many countries, these jobs are in abundance and the salary ranges at $30000 per annum . Any party intending to practise in this area must have the main requirements, education and certification for training. Candidates who exhibit good precision and competence in the job will always have an upper hand in searching for employment as employers are keen on these particlar qualities when recruiting additional staff members.

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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