Medical coding professionals are an essential part of the medical billing process. Services must be documented in numerous settings. For example, every time a patient visits a healthcare facility to receive services from their medical provider. This also includes visits to an ambulatory surgical center or any hospital outpatient facility, this too must be documented. Without a system in place for this type of services the medical industry would fail. Medical coding is the start of the process for Medicaid or Medicare claims and for private insurance companies. This also insures that medical providers and so forth receive payment for services rendered. The process is the same whether it be government sponsored or privately owned companies and medical coding is still an essential part of the process.
Medical coding dates back many, many years. It can actually be traced all the way back to the 1600's. Coding was first used in London, England during the great plague of London. During this time people were dying at an astounding rate due to fleas from filth and rats. The country had to set some sort of system in place to keep up with all the deaths. The system was identified as the London Bills of Mortality. The coding system was used to identify the number of deaths in each specific area or parish. Each parish were require to produce a week-by-week bill of mortality for the authorities. A more standardized coding system was set into place and developed in the 1800's by a man named Jacques Bertillon, an astute statistician and professor of demography at the School of Anthropology in Paris.
A study of the causes of death led him to introduce what would eventually be named the 'Bertillon classification'. He first introduced it at the Chicago Conference of the International Statistical Institute in 1893. His research, development and usefulness of this system led twenty six other countries to adapt the same system of coding.