UAE: Dubai adopts coding to enhance standardised medical service reporting
Source: Middle East Insurance Review | Nov 2019
The Dubai Health Authority (DHA) and the American Medical Association (AMA) have reached an agreement to support the standardised exchange of medical service data throughout Dubai. This will be a boon for insurers, healthcare providers, TPAs, regulators and other stakeholders.
The agreement provides the DHA a licence to use Current Procedural Terminology (CPT), a comprehensive code set copyrighted by the AMA, that enables interoperability, reporting, measurement, analysis, and benchmarking of medical services and procedures across Dubai’s healthcare system.
“The introduction of CPT coding is another milestone for the health system in Dubai. It will make the medical billing process highly efficient and accurate, with minimum human interference, and it will empower all stakeholders to become completely paperless. Additionally, it will enable accurate data collection that will help us devise evidence-based policies and processes to further enhance the healthcare system in Dubai,” said DHA director general Humaid Al Qutami.
For over 50 years, the CPT code set has served the needs of data-driven health systems which aim to control costs, improve quality, and increase access to care. The comprehensive, standardised language of CPT is a uniform and rigorous code set trusted as medicine’s universal language for reporting medical services and procedures provided to patients. M