Reflection: The significance of Ethical Coding Standards

Reflection: The significance of Ethical Coding Standards
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Reflection: The Significance of Ethical Coding Standards
The delivery of quality healthcare is the main objective of health facilities and the responsibility of health staff. Ensuring ethical standards and regulations is one of the ways that health facilities improve the quality of care through adherence to codes and practice guidelines. The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) sets out the ethical codes for governing health professionals by dictating the duties and expectations of health professionals in coding and presenting care information. According to Bryant (2018), the main function of the ethical coding standards is to mitigate the potential risks like fraud and abuse in tasks such as clinical documentation improvement, physician practice billing, inpatient coding, and charge capture through identification and regulation of key risk areas. Thus, the main objective of the AHIMA ethical coding standards is to ensure accurate and reliable Health Information Management (HIM) through setting quality practices and standards.
One of the major functions of the coding standards in upholding healthcare is to ensure that staff conduct and hospital policy in coding matches the regulatory requirements of bodies like AMA and AHA. These regulations and policies prevent hospitals from misrepresenting clinical information which leads to medical fraud. The codes also help in improving inter-disciplinary and professional collaboration by encouraging queries and consultations in coding practices as required by Codes 3, 4, and 6. The standards also benefit hospital information management by ensuring education and awareness of coding standards in health care institutions. Another importance of the Standards is that they ensure that coding technology designs and development are updated according to requirements and health convention findings according to Code 9. Technological regulations enhance healthcare innovations...