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What Is Medical Coding

In the world of medical coding, you have two relatively individual groups of medical coders:

1. People who do medical coding for clinics, physicians offices, and hospital emergency rooms. These people are most often referred to as �Outpatient Medical Coders�.

2. People who do medical coding in major hospitals. These people are typically referred to as �Inpatient Medical Coders�.

If you are interested in a medical coding career, it will be important to understand the difference between outpatient medical coding and inpatient medical coding.

If you have a procedure performed that requires you to be admitted to the hospital and stay overnight- this medical coding activity will require the expertise of an inpatient medical coder. If you must go in for a day procedure- this is considered an outpatient event and is typically assigned to an outpatient medical coder.

Numerous procedures that at one time required admission to the hospital are currently being performed consistently on an outpatient basis � which means they go into the hospital, have surgery and return home the same day and you don�t even have to be admitted to the hospital.

As you may suppose, there is a substantial difference in the expertise level required to apply medical codes to intricate inpatient operative reports vs. the level of expertise required to apply proper medical codes to a simple report for a cut or a stubbed toe in a clinic setting.

The reality is that the majority of medical coding is outpatient. Hospitals and physicians are performing progressively more of their procedures on an outpatient basis.

The majority of entry-level medical coders are going to begin their careers performing outpatient medical coding.

Outpatient medical coders who have been trained on the job generally rise to inpatient medical coding. This produces loads of opportunities for advancement over time.

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Chris Dunn enjoys writing articles about medical coding. See also: About-Medical-Transcription.com.

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