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.
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 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.
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 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.
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