Friday, June 27, 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 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.

The statistical classification system puts similar clinical concerns into specific categories. This coding is limited in order to a small size in order to prompt easy and quick mastery. Statistical methods are used in international statistical grouping of diseases and general health concerns. For instance, circulatory diseases are all placed in chapter ix and are coded as 100 to 199.There are precise categories such as supra-ventricular tachycardia under which we also have concepts such as auricular tachycardia, nodal tachycardia and proximal junction tachycardia. Another distinguishing feature is seen in the provision of unspecified conditions that are absent in any particular category. A special feature of the statistical method is that it contains provision of residual categories for other unspecified conditions.

In nomenclatures, there exists a separate listing and code for each clinical concept. From the above instance, each of the tachycardia that is listed has its own code. Thus, in this regard, it is viewed as ineffective in compiling these health statistics.

Coding systems specific in healthcare are of various types. Diagnostic codes are used in determining diseases and symptoms and can be used to measure morbidity and mortality. Procedure codes are numeric or alphanumeric codes used to identify interventions of health, exercised by medical professionals.

The world health organization gives several globally adopted classification designs to provide surveillance on health data for the population with regard to time and compiling national data in a consistent manner.

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 tendency in coding is outsourcing classification work to third parties. As technology develops, classification platforms are also developing and the outsourcing models will in effect begin to get good basis in the health industry.




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