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Medical CodingMedical coding is a very important administrative function of a doctor’s office. In the USA, a doctor’s treatment of a patient for his illness is followed by a long and time-consuming rigmarole of getting the insurance company of the patient receiving treatment to pay for it. The whole purpose of Medical coding is supposed to simplify the process by associating treatment, diagnosis, and medical procedures with letter and number representations. In the end, if the one giving medical treatment wants to get paid by an insurance company for the medical services rendered, then they have to use these medical codes to submit their claim for payment to the patients insurance company. As such, since Doctors do not and cannot sit all day entering codes, professionals who are trained and certified by the American Health Information Management Association do this Medical Coding. The codes are mandatory and have to be entered without any error or deviation, therefore this has allowed for a new category of workers that perform this task for doctors and other healthcare service providers. Knowledge on Medical Coding is imparted in a number of schools, but also a knowledge pool can be found on the Internet. Whether someone is trained on a school campus or receives training on the Internet, the important thing is not where one gets their training, but that the training received will allow the student to become a certified coder that is capable of meeting the demands of doing such Medical Coding for healthcare professionals. If done properly and accurately, which they must or the claim will be thrown back, Medical Coding helps in identifying the claims along with displaying the entire medical history of a patient. Medical coding also allows for the insurance company to look at the various diagnosis and treatment steps taken over the course of the treatment. With the importance of medical coding being understood by many healthcare providers and doctors, medical coders are in demand for this lucrative profession. Any shortfall in available personnel capable of meeting a medical establishments demand for someone with knowledge of medical coding is then cause for the work to be outsourced overseas. Realistically however, it is not only a shortfall in workers that is the cause for medical coding to be outsourced, as with other industries, this outsourcing is done as a means of cost containment. Nevertheless, outsourced or not, the demand for medical coding will not abate but will only continue to grow. Therefore, if one is properly trained in medical coding they need not worry that demand for this service will dry-up, as doctors and healthcare providers need to focus their energies on treatment of patients and not non-core tasks like medical coding that are better handled by those trained and certified to perform them |