Improving Clinical Coding Productivity and SNOMED CT Compliance

The Clinical Coding service is pivotal to the NHS. It uses health records to translate clinical terms into a sequence of codes which describe the diagnoses and procedures.

Smart Consult and Research has been providing expert clinical coding services to the NHS for over 15 years.

Hospitals and practices deal with an immense amount of patient data on a daily basis. Clinical coding allows that information to be translated accurately into categorised coded data that can then be used to ensure that the hospital is correctly reimbursed for treatments.

Coding in healthcare also makes it possible for management, analysts and others to monitor the provision of services, discover health and care trends and plan services accordingly.

Improving clinical coding accuracy and driving appropriate financial reimbursements

For the NHS in England, Clinical Coding ensures accurate payment for providers of care through the National Tariff Payments System (NTPS). In England, the data derived from the codes is used in Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) and Secondary Usage Services (SUS). This means it becomes the basis for performance measurement and benchmarking, but also for planning future health services and improvements in patient care.

Why Us?

Our Clinical Coders have a great understanding of how the data is used, so they can reinforce the importance of accurate and consistent recording.
We encourage communication between our Clinical Coders and clinicians to improve the documenting of relevant co- morbidities, thereby ensuring the claiming of correct payments for care and treatment

Why coding

Accurate coding across many medical disciplines requires the use of complex clinical vocabularies that are standardised between multiple systems.

ICD-10

For more than two decades the ICD‑10 clinical vocabulary has been in use by the NHS, and by many other global healthcare services.

SNOMED CT

But from April 2018 a new, more precise vocabulary tailored for use in electronic patient records is being implemented in the UK—SNOMED CT.

Vocabulary

SNOMED contains more than 300,000 medical terms, enabling finely pinpointed coding, but this in turn means that notes recorded by medical staff must be precise.

Accuracy

Our training and experience make it easier for our Clinical Coders to code treatments accurately using the full breadth of the SNOMED CT vocabulary.

Our Clinical Coding Services Include:

In-patient Episodes
Day-case Episodes
Emergency Department Episodes
Out-patient Episodes
Code Audit Services
Clinical Coding Training