Clinicians and coders are different: Examples of disparities in primary care coding.

Overview

There are many sources of bias in administrative databases. Coding professionals have traditionally assigned ICD-9-CM codes for patient encounters yet there are increasing numbers of physicians assigning codes to primary care visits. Four cases were coded by a physician and a professional coder with zero percent agreement in the absolute codes assigned. This presentation will compare the codes used for these cases, discuss causes of differences between them, and discuss research implications.