Health care coders in high demand

This week, the Baltimore Sun ran a feature story on Sandra Baker, a diagnostic coder at Northwest Hospital in Randallstown, just outside Baltimore. Asked what it takes to work in a hospital environment, Baker said teamwork, caring and respect are important values to keep. She added, "I love people, and I love helping people. So it makes it easy to do those things."

On a recurring basis, one of the hottest jobs in the Baltimore health care industry is health information coder. “Coders,” as they are called, verify information in patients’ records and code the information for various purposes. It’s a demanding job that attracts detail-oriented and meticulous personality types.

“This position is extremely hard to fill because there are not a lot of candidates in the field,” says Janice Lynn, Sinai Hospital business partner. “Since experienced coders are hard to find, hospitals work to retain these valuable employees when they have a good one. Hospitals such as ours specifically look for experience since there is a long learning curve.”

Health information coders check patient records for documentation of diagnoses and procedures. Coders must rely on their knowledge of medical terminology, disease processes and pharmacology. Another challenge is deciphering the handwriting of physicians and clinical staff. These technicians assign a code to each diagnosis and procedure. They consult bulky classification manuals and also rely on their medical knowledge to make sense of the patients’ treatment history. It can be monotonous and very meticulous work.

“One of the challenging issues we encounter when recruiting for coders is that many only have experience coding for physician’s offices,” says Joanie Montgomery, Northwest Human Resources Business Partner. “Since Northwest and Sinai are acute care hospitals, we both require hospital coding experience”.

“Hospitals and medical providers report coded data to insurance companies or the government [Medicare and Medicaid] for reimbursement of their expenses,” says Mary Lou Bond, Health Information manager at Sinai. “Internally, planners use coded data to identify patient needs, develop new services and evaluate quality of care. Researchers and public health officials use coded medical data to monitor patterns and explore new interventions. More and more Internet health care rating sites are using coded data to rate health care quality. Coding accuracy is highly important to health care organizations because of its impact on revenues and describing health outcomes.”

To perform this task, coders must possess expertise in the ICD-9-CM coding system and the surgery section within the CPT coding system. “But at heart, a coder is an investigator, a paper-pushing medical sleuth happy to scour every word in a medical record looking for documentation that can be coded,” says Mary Lou. “Illegible handwriting provides a challenge for us!”

To qualify as a health information coder, an applicant must complete coursework in medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, legal aspects of health information, coding and abstraction of data, statistics, database management, quality improvement methods, and computer science. The following schools in our region offer the program: Baltimore City and Baltimore County Community College and Howard County Community College. All inpatient coders are certified by the American Health Information Management Association. Those who pass the certification examination are awarded the CCS, CCS-P and CCA credentials.

If you'd like more information about becoming a coder, or to see available job listings for LifeBridge Health, visit lifejobs.org.

Are you a health information coder? What are the pluses and minuses of your job?

Photo of Sandra Baker courtesy of the Baltimore Sun.