Medical Coder Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Medical Coder - Research Paper Example They are like a very essential part of the health care industry and without them the industry cannot operate proficiently. What medical coders do is, whenever a patient receives any service from the physicians, the health care centre that has provided the facility to the patient needs to document the facility or service that they had provided to that particular patient. Then these medical coders receive the documented papers and extract the relevant information from it. Then they need to assign a particular CPT code for every type of medical facility provided. Then these bills are further being preceded by the patient’s medical insurance provider. Approximately, for all these health care facilities provided, there are more than 9000 CPT codes that are assigned. And not only this, the number of ICD codes is over 13500. Whereas, CPT stands for Current procedural terminology and ICD stands for International Classification of Diseases. ICD codes are assigned for the medical diagnosis. The medical coders generate reports after assigning the codes to inpatient and outpatients. The reports are useful for the management purpose in the hospitals, as well as the information is also used compensating the health care providers. These coders are hired by the hospitals themselves. The history of medical coders dates back to 1347 at the time of Black Death. At that time Sicily was facing the bubonic plague that had even reached to London causing deaths of almost 70,000 citizens of London by 1348 (Taylor, 2009). The plague was not ended at that time, it continued for almost 3 more centuries. At that time there was a London publication that used to publish the number of fatalities caused by this plague on weekly basis. The city government of London then used to trace the disease throughout the city. This is actually the earliest form of medical coding and classification of