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How did medical coding originate? Well, once upon a time, a mommy and a daddy loved each other very much and decided to take that love and turn it into a quantified system of medical coding. Okay, that’s not quite how it went.
Although medical coding is currently employed alongside the use of advanced medical and computing technology, the practice is much older than one might initially guess. In fact, the earliest noted form of medical coding is cited in the 1660s – before computers, type writers, and digital thermometers. See this post for more of what medical coding is today.
How did something so advanced date back so far in history? Out of necessity. Any high school student who has had a history or social studies class can tell you that the seventeenth century was rough on London, with plague decimating populations of people. The bubonic plague outbreak was so devastating that doctors decided to record the circumstances of the deaths it caused for some hope of beating it.
The next big round of early medical coding was late nineteenth century France. A physician named Jacques Bertillion developed the Classification of Causes of Death, which became standardized within a decade.
Today, medical coders work with ICD-9 codes (or ICD-10 for those who’ve already converted to the most current codes), which stand for International Classification of Diseases, ninth (or tenth) revision. Like its predecessors, the ICD code system is death-driven, primarily codifying conditions that result in fatality.
Differing in this respect, CPT (Common Procedural Terminology) codes that developed in the 1960s in the United States offer a standard set of codes to describe medical procedures ranging from diagnoses to various treatments. This set of codes is the last major development to the system of medical coding.
When you look at its place in the grand scheme, however, it’s not so much a dead-end for coding but the jaw-dropping final chapter if we think about coding as a film franchise.
See this post on the future of medical coding.
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Make sure to take a CPC certification practice exam before taking the real test. Practice tests will help you pass on your first try.
Click here to see the practice exams or to view the additional CPC exam study guides click here.
Click here for information on getting medical coding training, degrees, and/or certificates.
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