Billing And Coding

Billing And Coding

Scope of Practice: Medical Billing and Coding
Very few jobs in today’s economy are recession proof as we all know. One field that is sure to have longevity and withstand the woes of whatever economic situation that our country is in, is that of health care. People will always need health care and doctors will always need competent and efficient employees who can bill their patients or their insurance companies for services rendered. That is where Medical Billers and Coders come in. A career in Medical Billing and Coding entails processing and submitting papers to insurance companies and following up with them to receive payments from them for services provided by a medical professional. Common skills needed to be successful in this profession include working well with numbers, typing averaging thirty-five words per minute, paying great attention to detail, computer skills, and the likes.Knowledge of both the medical and business sides of health care is essential in this detail-oriented field of health information management as well.

Medical billing and coding is an essential function to the well-being of an organization and the healthcare industry. Without it there would be lots confusion as to who owes what and what do they owe for. From the time a doctor sees a patient to the time the patient leaves a facility everything is documented. Though medical billing and coding is always described as a whole, they are separate in functions.
Medical coding, which dates back to the seventeenth century, is described as a process of assigning numeric and alpha values to all types of medical services (Aalseth, 2005). The history of medical coding was actually started in Great Britain as the London Bills of Mortality. By 1893 a woman by the name of Jacque Bertillon started a list that was approved by the International Statistical Institute as a standardized system for classifying deaths.   This list was later known as the Bertillon Classification which was, by the 1900’s,...