Medical billing and coding education is a career field many people look into that is challenging and innovative in itself. There are aspects of this area of the healthcare industry that depend on highly skilled and dedicated individuals to get right. One of the aspects of that field is ICD-10 Coding which will be shared with people interested in this career field.
The medical industry is a challenging career field filled with great minds and even more amazing people. There are many aspects of the medical field that depend on people who are dedicated to their careers and skilled at their job. People who enter the healthcare industry are searching for a meaningful career and a way to get there as soon as possible.
ICD-10-PCs
ICD stands for International Classification of Diseases, 10 Revision, and PCS stands for Procedure Coding System which is part of the U.S. cataloging system for procedural codes. These codes help medical professionals to track health interventions and they can use them to refer back to them when working with their patients. The abbreviated version is known as ICD-10-PCS in short, or as people in medical billing and coding refer to it as simply ICD-10.
Why the Revision?
ICD-10 replaced the ninth revision of the original system starting in 1993 and is a clinical modification specific to the United States. ICD-10 Coding is used today in hospital and inpatient systems across the country. The new code contains more codes than the old ICD-9 version and has to be used on all Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) transactions that take place.
Structure of Coding
People who wish to learn medical coding may find it a bit overwhelming at first when exploring the subject matter. While there are many codes that are used frequently and require attention to detail, one fact to keep in mind is these codes benefit the patient and the medical professional.
ICD-10 was originally developed by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services alongside the 3M Health Information Management to help track mortality and morbidity statistics on an international level and to compare the information.
The system itself uses three to seven-digit codes that are alphanumeric so medical procedures can be specified. The first digit of the code is an indicator of the medical practice being done for example monitoring, surgery, measuring, and other factors. The digits that follow afterward specify the device being used, root operation, approach, and body part. When these digits have been entered in the seventh character, it is called the qualifying digit.
The first three digits of codes are crucial to learning in medical billing and coding school and are stored in the ICD manual as a reference. One example is the code that begins with 0C0, which could be a surgical or medical procedure done on the throat or mouth. This would be referred to as an alteration to specify the kind of treatment that had been done to the patient.
Why are Billing and Coding Necessary in the Medical Industry?
We receive this question quite a bit from people who are considering enrolling in our medical billing and coding school to study for a new career. The career itself basically boils down to the fact that every patient who is checked into a medical facility is given a diagnosis by the presiding physician. The job of person responsible for medical coding uses the doctor’s notes to find the code based on the diagnosis given by the doctor. This created code in accordance with the guidelines people learn over the course of their program serves two purposes. The first being the code makes it easier to search through a database and directly affects billing.
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