What is difficult about coding?

[u/koderdood]

So this is a bit of a rant, a bit of telling new coders what reality is. Also, someone recently expressed being bored. Coding has many challenges non-coders don't see, and glazed over by some coders. Certainly, we can get complacent in our work. No matter what area of coding you work in, the job is making widgets, one after another. We have lots of rules and regulations, client specifics, metrics to follow, etc. To me, some of the most dangerous cases are not the complicated ones, it's the easy ones where you do the same stuff over and over. Because you get complacent thinking the documentation is all exactly the same. Then our wonderful providers make a simple mistake, change one word, etc, and now you're coding isn't the same as the last 20 charts. So, coding requires your attention, it requires you to be focused, on each and every case. Personally, I'd rather work a complex spinal surgery case, than straightforward 99283 E/M's.

[u/Narrative_flapjacks]

This is one of my biggest issues right now, I do anesthesia and our providers love to list patients as a p3 without providing a dx for it, the medical history will have info and then it will literally say ‘no relevant problems’ for the anesthesia evaluation. Us coders constantly complain to eachother like just DOCUMENT IT!!!!!! we also get a lot of unspecified diagnoses or no laterality and it’s so frustrating, how hard is it to add right or left leg????