- Medical billers and coders play a vital role in the connection
between health care providers, patients and insurance companies. As a
medical biller and coder, you’ll need to read patient charts to
determine medical history, including diagnoses and treatments given.
Based on these charts, you’ll use a set of established medical codes in
order to transcribe patient history into a type of “shorthand” that will
be used by both health care providers and insurance companies. - A very similar career, and often available through the same
programs, is a medical transcriptionist career. Medical transcription
jobs have the same goal as medical biller and coder jobs, but medical
transcriptionists listen to physicians’ diagnoses and treatment plans,
and then write down codes based on that, while medical billers and
coders get their information from reading patient reports. - It’s worth noting that the current code used to track patient
diagnoses and treatments is ICD-11—”ICD” stands for International
Classification of Diseases. ICD-11 gives coders the ability to be much
more specific in their documentation over the previous ICD revisions.
duties no matter what type of facility they’re employed in. From clinics
to hospitals to physicians’ offices, medical billers and coders use
medical codes to document patient diagnoses and treatments.
Specifically, their duties include:
- Determining the correct codes for patient records
- Using codes to bill insurance providers
- Interacting with physicians and assistants to ensure accuracy
- Keeping track of patient data over multiple visits
- Managing detailed, specifically-coded information
- Maintaining patient confidentiality and information security
While many medical billers and coders do work on-site in hospitals
and clinics, they’re typically far-removed from where patient care is
taking place. While you will be required to interact and communicate
with physicians and assistants to a certain degree, much of your work
will be independent from everything else that goes on in a health care
facility.