The Dubai Health Authority, DHA, and the American Medical Association, AMA, has announced an agreement today that will support the standardised exchange of medical service data throughout the Emirate of Dubai.
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.
Humaid Al Qutami, Director-General of the Dubai Health Authority said, "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 also enable accurate data collection that will help us devise evidence-based policies and processes to further enhance the healthcare system in Dubai."
For over fifty years, the CPT code set has served the needs of data-driven health systems who aim to control costs, improve quality, and increase access to care. The comprehensive, standardized language of CPT is a uniform and rigorous code set that is trusted as medicine’s universal language for reporting medical services and procedures provided to patients.
Saleh Al Hashimi, CEO of Dubai Health Insurance Corporation, DHIC, said, "The introduction of the 2018 CPT code set in Dubai will provide a unified and streamlined language for all healthcare providers, insurance payers, third party administrators and DHIC as the regulator, making it easier for healthcare providers to report more accurately for the care they deliver and ensuring speedier approval processes for patients.
With over 10,000 codes available for services and procedures, the CPT codes will better capture the state of modern healthcare in Dubai. It will also enable Dubai’s medical community to support technology-enabled services in digital medicine and foster innovative and integrated care models for providing high-quality medical care." Al Hashimi added that the adoption of CPT will enhance eClaimLink, Dubai’s centralised data exchange system that healthcare payers, providers and DHIC as Regulator in Dubai use with modern clinical content.
"Medical knowledge is constantly advancing so the AMA invests extensive resources in an open and rigorous process that convenes experts from the medical community to produce practical enhancements to the CPT code set," said AMA Board Trustee Gerald E. Harmon, M.D.
"This rigorous process keeps the CPT code set current with contemporary medical science and technology, so it can fulfill its vital role as the language of medicine today and the code to its future."
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