Medical Terminology Of Medical Billing And Coding

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Medical Billing and Coding entails professionals that process patient data which includes treatment records and insurance information. They must code a patient's diagnosis (primary, secondary, etc) as well as payment requests from the patient's insurance company. Medical billers and coders must learn and use medical terminology in order to process these diagnoses.

Medical terminology is the uniformed language in the healthcare world which allows healthcare professionals, regardless of specific field, state, size of entity to "speak the same language" and be consistent when it comes to ailments and billing. A person suffering from acid reflux in New York should have the same coding as someone with acid reflux in Florida.

According to Banova (2013), " most medical terms consist of three basic components: root word (the base of the term), prefixes (letter groups in front of the root word) and suffixes (letter groups at the end of the root word). When placed together, these three components define a particular medical term." An example of a medical term would be the word arthritis. The root is arthro which means joint. The suffix -itis means inflammation. Therefore when combining the root word and the suffix, the term arthritis means the inflammation of the joints.
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Based on a patient's condition and diagnosis, ICD codes are sent to the insurance companies. If the insurance company sees that the codes submitted are completely irrelevant to the complaints, then they may decide to not pay that claim as it may