Medical billing and coding are one of the fastest-growing fields in healthcare and provide decent opportunities for the career. With this in mind, my dream job is to be a clinical/medical coder, also known as a diagnostic coder. Medical coding refers to converting diagnoses and procedures into universally recognized alphanumeric medical codes. On the other hand, medical billing is submitting claims to receive the payment for the services provided (Kelley et al., 2019). Therefore, the processes of medical billing and coding go hand in hand. Once the report is coded, the same is submitted along with some essential information and submitted for insurance claims. If the coding is right and there is no problem with the claim, it is approved: otherwise, it is rejected.
According to Nyhus (2021), the global medical billing and coding industry generated $9.3 billion in 2019. Schnell et al. (2018) state that the industry is expected to grow at a stronger annual growth rate of about 13%. Today, most healthcare organizations prefer to hire professional medical billing companies to implement their medical billing and management solutions. The more healthcare providers are going to trust medical billing and coding companies, the more they will grow in the future.
As a clinical/medical coder, my main responsibility would be to help healthcare facilities manage insurance payments, invoices, and claims. Therefore, some of the objectives and ideas I would formulate and implement to organize process and documentation to assist with revenue and/or quality metrics based on coding include; to analyze clinical statements and reports, which includes the patient’s condition, prescriptions, etc., to prepare and send claims or invoices for payment, to follow up with insurance companies and patients about outstanding bills, to track payments, and to correct rejected claims.
References
Kelley, K. A., Hoops, H. E., Palmer, L., Cohen, N. A., & Brasel, K. J. (2019). Implementation of a medical coding curriculum for surgery residents.The American Journal of Surgery, 217(5), 834-838.
Nyhus, J. E. (2021). Appropriate coding and billing in occupational health. The Nurse Practitioner, 46(10), 18-26.
Schnell, M., Couffignal, S., Lieber, J., Saleh, S., & Jay, N. (2018). Interpretation of Best Medical Coding Practices by Case-Based Reasoning—A User Assistance Prototype for Data Collection for Cancer Registries. In International Workshop on Artificial Intelligence in Health (pp. 190-198). Springer, Cham.