Medical coders do various coding related tasks in the healthcare industry. Their jobs can be mainly divided into three divisions, such as: Hospital/in patient coding, Billing/ payment coding and coding for medical auditing.
Medical coders will hold all your in-patient and out-patient coding needs. They will record doctor’s notes, diagnosis, tests, billing information, and more related services, to ensure your system is just accurate for the next time when this patient will visit any physician and the entire patient’s malaise related information’s are readily and easily accessible. These are the mainstream jobs of the medical coders. A majority of coders, who are working in different organizations, mostly are doing in-patient or out-patient medical coding for any clinic, hospital or physician’s offices.
Another mainstream function of medical coding professionals is auditing. Although relatively new, but this profession has evolved a lot in last couple of years. A medical auditing coder is the professional who transcribes the findings of the auditing reports in any healthcare settings and record those giving different alpha numerical codes. They record these auditing reports as such these will be accessible easily in the future for any comparison or clarification. An auditing department is a nice place to start your career in a medical coding company or sometimes in a healthcare company. This can also be used as an experiment service to ensure customers enjoy proper services with the organization and the proper functioning of the team to some extent. An audit involves inspection of your current medical coding and billing process and records for any malpractices, inconsistencies, malfunctioning, inaccuracies, and out-of-date coding and then updating and fixing everything.
Third and final division of mainstream segmentation of job function for coding personnel is medical billing. Many medical coders are engaged in medical billing function of different healthcare institutions, like clinics, hospitals, diagnostic centers, physician’s offices and so on. Many medical billing jobs are posted everyday in job searching websites, such as Indeed.com, monster jobs.com, Glass door.com etc. Thus, a medical coding company maintains a billing team of coding professionals familiar with all the insurance requirements for medical coding to enable your office pay correctly and of course, on time. Medical billing professionals must have to know the insurance policies that apply to bill reimbursements side by side all the regular medical coding guidelines, so that if a patient claims his/ her medical bill should be reimbursed then as a professional he/ she should use all the policies and guidelines to solve the issue that the patients claim whether inappropriate or not. In this role, a bill professional should also have moral and ethical standard to meet the demand of the society, as the common peoples don’t know the rules, they just expect that the medical biller will do the right for him.
However, beside these mainstream professions of medical coding, many medical coders are working in various job functions, such as, some are working in- house, some are working from home online, some are contractual, some are permanent. But, whatever their job functions are, their core job remains the same, coding for the betterment of healthcare services for the society.