Excerpt from: Medical Billing and Coding Field: Past Present and Future
History of the Field
The medical billing and coding field, indeed the world of health insurance,
would be unrecognizable if it were not for the two elements that make up the “coding” part of the Medical Billing
and Coding field. The first of the three elements is diagnostic coding, the backbone. “Diagnostic coding dates back
to seventeenth-century England,” reports the ICD.9.CM International Classification of Diseases. The
system that was used then was known as the London Bills of Mortality. It wasn’t until 1937 that the method of monitoring
information evolved into the International List of Causes of Death. It was the World Health Organization (WHO), the public
health arm of the United Nations, which published a statistical listing in 1948 and that listing could be used to track both
morbidity and mortality. It was that listing, called the International Classification of Diseases (ICD), which is still used
today. It is now in its 10th revision, although the 9th revision titled ICD-9 and published in 1977,
is still the revision used in common practice. In 1988 Congress passed the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage Act which included
a mandate requiring the use of the ICD-9 codes by physicians on all Medicaid claims. In 1996 it was mandated that codes be
of the highest possible specificity.
