HOSPITAL CODING

Hospital Coding

Hospital Coding

Introduction

Physicians of the modern world have not been content with the spiritual inspiration of prayers and the moral commitments of medical oaths. The large medical institutions of urban society have required complex relationships among medical personnel who demand detailed procedures to prevent embarrassing ethical controversy and disruption of services. Lengthy treatises on medical subjects, which had enlightened physicians on ethical matters since the earliest times, were not easy to cite by paragraph and line and frequently concealed ethical instruction in needless verbiage. Reducing these essays to lists of rules, proponents of practitioner control produced elaborate ethical codes.

Hospital Coding: A Discussion

In the twentieth century, a number of national governments has incorporated ethical codes into legal statutes governing the medical profession, to be enforced by an official, publicly appointed medical board (The National Centre for Classification in Health (NCCH), 2003). The precepts in these codes sometimes accord with the broader principles of the Percival tradition, but many provisions deal with problems of recent origin and reflect a modern concern for both public and individual welfare.

Some of these codes deal with single subjects. For example, the Nuremberg Code, which is the product of international law, deals with medical research on human subjects. In the United States, the federal government's regulations on the same subject function as a code of conduct as does the Belmont Report, a set of ethical principles on research developed by the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research (1978).

Underlying the development of these codes is a fundamental issue of ethics: Is the professional group or the general public responsible for deciding what the ethical norms of the lay-professional relation should be? Even if the profession is deemed the proper authority for determining what constitutes ethical conduct, it is not clear exactly ...