Does Clinical Coding Make Any Difference for Patient Care?

Image created by Rudy Chidiac. © Open Medical 2024. All Rights Reserved

Most clinicians don’t care about clinical coding.

It's time-consuming, tedious, and feels far removed from why they pursued medicine in the first place. Having to scroll through dropdown menus and navigate clunky systems to assign codes feels like an admin task—something useful for billing or data analysis but seemingly irrelevant to what they care about: patient care.

But what if it is? What if, beyond the irritation, clinical coding can directly impact care delivery?

Let’s take fragility fractures, for example. These fractures are caused by minor incidents like low-impact falls and are often due to underlying conditions like osteoporosis. Treating the fracture itself is important, but it’s only the beginning. Without proper follow-up, these patients face a high risk of suffering another, usually more severe, fracture. It’s a cycle that leads to chronic pain, reduced mobility, loss of independence, and a sharp decline in quality of life.

And the stakes are high. In the UK alone, there are around 500,000 fragility fractures every year. Some hospitals even handle up to 4,000 cases annually while already operating under significant resource constraints. When teams are stretched, identifying every at-risk patient is difficult, and even more so when these services rely on paper-based processes.

This is where clinical codes can become a lot more than just an administrative task.

With the right systems in place, clinical coding stops being a passive data entry exercise and instead triggers life-saving interventions.

Imagine a patient comes into the hospital with a fracture. A clinician enters clinical codes into the system—maybe it’s a hip fracture caused by a low-impact fall in a patient over 50. The system automatically recognises these criteria and flags the patient for assessment by the Fracture Liaison Service (FLS). That flag ensures that the patient doesn’t just get treated for the immediate fracture but also receives an assessment and follow-up care to prevent another one from happening.

We’ve seen this simple shift—from coding being a static record to an active trigger—have a huge impact on patient care.

One hospital using Pathpoint eTrauma and Pathpoint FLS saw a 15-fold increase in the identification of fragility fracture patients. That is thousands of patients who may have otherwise been overlooked who were flagged for preventative care, reducing their risk of future fractures and the serious complications that come with them.

Of course, it doesn’t just apply to osteoporosis. Clinical coding can be a powerful tool in countless other areas of healthcare. It can flag high-risk patients who need early optimisation before surgery, ensure clinicians have complete and accurate histories when making treatment decisions, trigger automated follow-up questionnaires for ongoing care, and so much more. Beyond individual patient impact, coding also strengthens the healthcare system as a whole, feeding into public health data that helps shape better strategies and policies.

Clinical coding won’t always change what happens in the moment, but it can absolutely change the care patients receive over time. It might still be frustrating. It may never feel like the most rewarding part of the job. But it is one of those things where the impact is bigger than it seems. And with digital tools that effectively integrate coding into clinical workflows—like Pathpoint—the impact can be even greater, turning clinical coding from an admin task to an integral part of delivering better care.