Medical billing and coding are two important related facets of the healthcare industry. Both medical billing and medical coding are part of revenue cycle management or the part of healthcare industry that deals with payments to healthcare providers for the services rendered. To make things simple, we will look into the process and aspects of medical coding first before getting into medical billing.
The initial purposes of medical coding was to provide morbidity stats to the WHO, verifying the need for patient care and providing statistics helpful to analysis of healthcare costs. Medical coding is now very much relied upon by the insurance industry for reimbursements to medical providers too. The coding processes have been revised from ICD-9 format to the latest ICD-10 format which in turn contains codes which are more extensive and very specific.