Sometimes, flu is not merely flu to quite a lot of a medical practitioner. Likewise, descriptions for human organs may vary as much as flavors of vanilla used in an ice cream shop. To implement a balance between various standards of medical practice, medical coding is launched into the health care industry. All medically skilled personnel irrespective of location are likely to adhere to the bible of therapeutic terms.
Much delusions and sub standards are created earlier from wrong prediction of diagnoses and procedures. Now, in this era of advanced & fast moving medical science, it is the perfect time to get irregularities to an end. By doing so, it is expected to bring down the number of lawsuits and insurance claims brought about by a wrong diagnosis.
Medical coding is not just a simple data entry process. This includes tagging of string of alphabets and numbers to a medical assessment or process came about as a result of arising differences of healthcare professionals being trained in different regions. Having being established with an educational background and its set of terms, some wish to work abroad for the purpose of contributing to under developed societies.
Knowledge improvement and career progression are few of the many reasons for health care practitioners to work in places other than home. Thus, utilizing a form of medical coding that is appreciated at an international level one will find same medical standards everywhere.
In brief, medical coders create unique alphanumerical codes from patient’s history of diagnoses, test and other healthcare assessments which will be very much helpful for billing & storage purposes in the future. When a patient comes to a physician’s chamber, hospital out-patient ward or to treat a chronic condition from a specialist medical practitioner, provider or doctor’s assistant document all the services (analysis, diagnosis, assessment, medication etc.) that patient gets from the above healthcare settings. Then the medical coder creates a unique code for that patient from the documentation of those services.
Based upon that medical code the health care provider or the patient provides the bill. This unique medical code also helps to store various clinical data of that particular patient which may be very helpful in future. On doing this process skilled medical coder follows some standard guidelines set by the American Association of Professional Coders (AAPC) or American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). In order to make medical coding process more authentic and substantial, various specialist coders have emerged such as Cardiac medical coders, Diabetic medical coders, Renal medical coders, Cancer medical coders, Pediatric medical coders, Surgical medical coders and so on. Now a day’s these specialist medical coders are doing their job more perfectly aligning with the need of the patient.
Professional coding is also used in clinical research and drug discovery purposes. Here, a typical code that shows a certain trend is considered eligible for more study. Here coding process is slightly different from the medical diagnosis and treatment processes. All features of a particular drug like safety, efficacy, reactogenicity, tolerability, side effects, contraindication, method of use, use in pregnancy and lactation, overdose are assessed with the condition of the patient while preparing the medical code. Many advanced softwares have emerged recently to make the coding process more effective & efficient but the need of a skilled medical coder in the healthcare industry vital.