VPS Healthcare, the healthcare conglomerate with a chain of hospitals in the Indian subcontinent and West Asia, has ventured into medical coding by launching a new group company Dynamed Healthcare Solutions. It has started operations at Infopark in Kochi.

Shamsheer Vayalil, Chairman, VPS Healthcare, said modelled after the US and other western countries, recently, the UAE has made medical coding mandatory while Saudi Arabia and Qatar are on the way to follow suit. Considering these, medical coding is opening up enormous growth potential in the region. Initially, Dynamed Healthcare will cater to the requirements of its own hospitals in the Gulf, which is handling around 3 million patients every year. In phases, the company would like to cater to the overseas requirements as well, he said.

Medical coding, facilitating revenue cycle management, is the transformation of healthcare diagnosis, procedures, medical services, and equipment into universal medical alphanumeric codes. The diagnoses and procedure codes are taken from medical record documentation such as transcription of physician's notes, laboratory and radiologic results.

Medical coding professionals help ensure the codes are applied correctly during the medical billing process, which includes abstracting the information from documentation, assigning the appropriate codes, and creating a claim to be paid by insurance carriers.

Coding, in addition to bringing in procedural efficiencies in everything related to healthcare management, makes the industry paperless and thus is reckoned as a giant leap towards environmental-friendliness and transparency.

At present, there are over 50,000 coders working in Chennai and Hyderabad each, while there are more than 20,000 coders in Bengaluru, over 10,000 in Coimbatore and approximately 3,000 in Thiruvananthapuram, all are working for countries in the West.

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