Is Coding Any More Secure Than MT?
I notice that Advance has no one here blogging about coding, yet the discussion forum is predominantly skewed that way. Does the topic just not lend itself to conversation because it is so black and white, like accounting? When I realized my art major would probably mean having to teach, I did a 180 and changed to accounting/business, so I grok the geekier aspects of coding. Perhaps it would be too difficult to blog weekly about something so technical.
Still, I have questions that can't be answered with an ICD code or school recommendation, and it's kind of an offshoot of the things that have plagued transcription for so long.
Back in my dreaded Computers in Healthcare course, we did a unit on coding--specifically, the software used to facilitate it. After playing with a few examples, I found it fun and easy, yet couldn't help wondering if it wasn't polished enough that coders would soon find themselves on the brink of extinction, much like the considerably less elegant mess that is speech recognition (which still needs us, but valued at a fraction of the work actually put into it) or EMR software, some of which is easy enough that the clients can enter their own information, bypassing MTs altogether. If anything, coders seem more apt to be replaced, simply because the process is so black and white. It's all left-brain stuff, none of the nebulous narrative we deal with in MT, but information you can easily plug into little boxes.
Then, I saw this: ICDMeister, an online application that allows healthcare providers do their own coding. Granted, it doesn't have all the bells and whistles the full-blown coding apps do (i.e. no illustrated references or wizards to lead you down the right trails because it assumes you already have the medical know-how), but it's slick, and if you view the demo videos you can see it's designed with the idea of plugging the information into your EMR, to boot. Undoubtedly, it needs the periodic updates to integrate the changes that continually take place in coding (as the coder-oriented software does), but I can see why doctors would view this as an irresistible option for cost-cutting. Healthcare providers have always erroneously viewed clerical costs as the first line of budget cuts, after all.
It has never made sense to me why a doctor making six figures or better would consider it economical to handle his own transcription--especially since so many of them are severely handicapped in spelling and general language rules--but I think we're starting to see a generational shift. Many of these software applications have been written BY doctors (Synapse and ICDMeister prime examples). These guys aren't necessarily going to make any more financial sense spending their own time plugging data into these things than hiring some peon to do it for them, but they are far more tech-savvy than their predecessors and conceivably could think this was a great way to spend their time away from patient care--or perhaps foisting the task off onto the office staff they already employ. All they need to see is insurance claims accepted and money flowing into the practice and they're convinced it's worthwhile, right?
It all makes me flash back to what Robert Anton Wilson predicted a couple decades ago regarding evolution--that the intervals between major discoveries/inventions decrease exponentially, i.e. the time between fire, wheel, Industrial Revolution, computers, microprocessors, etc. all appear twice as fast as the last discovery, and the closer we get to the cosmic trigger that will signal our next human evolution (yes, cue the monolith from 2001), the discoveries will be coming so fast that we will have a hard time comprehending it all.
When the status quo changes so fast and so many of us find our livelihood rendered all but obsolete, it really makes you wonder how long to dig your heels in and when you're going to have to give in and change your path lest you find the world's passed you by. We've been reeling from that in MT for quite some time and it suddenly seems apparent that MTs don't have an exclusive on that angst.