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.
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.
The types of coding methods as discussed include diagnostic codes generally used in determination of disorders, diseases and symptoms which may be used to determine morbidity and death, pharmaceutical codes which identify medications, procedural codes that are the alphanumeric codes or numbers used to identify given health interventions undertaken by medical professionals and topographical codes that indicate a precise location in the body.
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.