Brainy Guru: Insights On The Concept Of Hospital Coding

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 used to track ailments and related health issues which include chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus and heart diseases, contagious diseases like norovirus, flu and athletes foot. These procedures are useful to the development of public health programs, private insurance company policy development and in workers compensation carrier.

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.

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 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 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 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.