Health Care Code Sets

The healthcare industry throughout the world relies on several communications standards to efficiently share information. Members of the healthcare ecosystem involved in this data interchange include doctors and medical offices, hospitals, insurance providers, pharmacies, pharmaceutical manufacturers, as well as government agencies dealing with healthcare. An important component of these standards are the sets of codes that uniformly represent and identify different elements of the industry, such as diagnoses and procedures, and diseases and drugs.

When a healthcare provider diagnoses a disease, carries out a procedure, prescribes medication or orders lab tests, they note a specific code on the patient’s medical records. The use of such codes makes sharing information much easier and less error-prone, and also speeds up processes such as billing and payments.

While the use of these codes has increased the overall efficiency of the healthcare industry, problems still abound. Key among them is the fact that the code sets are issued by different industry and statutory bodies including government agencies, healthcare industry associations and autonomous bodies. In some cases there is overlap among the different code sets. The technology that supports these code sets have also not advanced as much as it should – most of these codes are stored in data files without a way to browse and search for specific fields of interest, or to keep track of revisions over a period of time.

A new online service called CommonDataHub aims to address some of these deficiencies. CommonDataHub brings together most of the commonly used healthcare code sets together in a single repository and makes it available on the internet with easy to use tools to find specific information quickly. All of this information is now readily available to healthcare professionals as well as anyone researching medical information. For example, if you are curious about your own medical records and find some incomprehensible codes, CommonDataHub may be able to help you!

Once you have found the information you need, you can use the features of the website to download data in whatever format is most convenient for you. It is safe to say this new website fills a huge need within the healthcare industry.

Visit the CommonDataHub site at: http://www.commondatahub.com