Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Fundamentals Of International 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.

Diagnosis codes track diseases and related health concerns including chronic ailments like diabetes melitus and cardiac diseases, and ailments which spread easily such as norvirus, athlete foot and the flu. The procedural codes are applied in public health programs, private insurance companies and others sectors including workers compensation carriers.

These classification identities are used in most areas of medicine, pharmacies, in public health as well as informatics analysis in medicine . They include statistical analysis of diseases, therapy reactions, reimbursement of diagnostic groups, decisions for support systems and surveillance on epidemic and pandemic outbreaks. Basically, the main classes in classification systems are the country specific standards and international standards.

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 nomenclature system, the listing and codes for every medical concept are done separately. For example, all notes related to the tachycardia defects are recorded separately from codes with other names. As such, the nomenclature method is unwieldy for compiling statistics in health.

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.

Healthcare coding is growing rampantly in the health industry and the demand for coders is very high. In most countries, this job is plentiful and the salaries mostly start at $30000 a year. Anyone considering to join a career in this particular healthcare line must have the two main basics of the field, education and certification. In addition, aspirants competence and preciseness are two qualities that would give one an upper hand in the job

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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