Why is medical billing and coding important?
Medical billing and coding is considered as the core of the revenue cycle for healthcare which ensures that healthcare providers are promptly compensated for the clinical and medical services they offer to patients. Codes help in the accurate and efficient billing.
Medical billing and coding are essential processes to maintain the flow in hospitals as well as medical offices as medical facilities heavily rely upon insurance companies and other health programs to provide funding.
It is essential that medical billing and coding to be performed in a precise manner. Each patient who goes to the hospital, the immediate health center, or other medical centers receives the information which must be recorded.
Medical billing and coding are essential to maintaining the flow for patients and medical offices in the health care industry.
The billing part is a means to an end. You need your claim filed to your insurance so that payment can be made.
Coding has much more importance beyond payment (can you tell I’m a coder?)!
Simply defined medical coding translates why you seek care and the care rendered into alphanumeric codes. These codes are used for research purposes, data collection (also called registries) and payment purposes.
Researchers can obtain deindentified health information based on your codes. Maybe someone wants to answer the question, “how many people with diabetes also have hypertension” or “what the top theee reasons people get blood transfusions”? These deindentified abstractions can answer those questions for researchers, which can give them preliminary results to get funding for bigger research projects.
For registries, governmental agencies and hospitals track events and conditions such as traumas, causes of death, cancer types/morphologies, implanted devices, and hospital caused injuries for all sorts of reasons.
For payment, codes give insurance companies an idea of what specifically was rendered and why it should be covered (medical necessity).