What are the Medical Coding Software Requirements?

Objective: To identify medical coding software requirements. Design: To identify medical coding software requirements, 15 medical coding software products used in Iran and 6 medical coding software products used in other countries, were surveyed. Based on a literature review, a checklist containing general and specific features of medical coding software was developed. Measurement: The criteria used for this comparison are as follows: operating system type; connected to other departments or stand alone; and general and specific requirements of medical coding software. Results: DOS and Windows operating systems were used in 4_(29%) and 11_(71%) software products, respectively. Just 3 software products were networked products, the others being stand alone. Flexibility and improvement were 42.8% and 41%, respectively. Numerical and alphabetic lists of diseases and surgeries enjoyed the highest and the lowest frequency with 93.3% and 6.6%, respectively. In general, there are lots of weaknesses in medical coding software products in Iran. Conclusion: Some specific features should be included in medical coding software, such as: flexibility; user-friendliness; back up ability; satisfaction of health care needs; software support, data recovery: data sharing; parallel searching; data security, integrity, validity, and accessibility; databank coding; death information recording; and researcher identification