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.
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 a nomenclature system, there exists separate lists and codes for every clinical concept in health. Considering the previous example, each of the listed tachycardia bears its own code. Thus, in this respect, nomenclature is regarded as ineffective in compiling 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.
World Health Organization has set several universally endorsed classification structures to facilitate surveillance on health related data among populations and also to compile national data that is consistent. This family, in international classification, includes the three major classification groupings on the basis of health parameters prepared by world health organization and approved by World 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 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.