[jasonlbaptiste]

Insurance billing. These need to be exact in order to correlate to a) rates negotiated b) data collected for future underwriting c) exact repayment. Medical billing is a crazy world.

[hackuser]

Isn't all this coding a U.S. phenomenon? I've read that single-payer systems like Canada's require orders of magnitude less labor and paperwork.

[danohu]

In the UK there is still a lot of this, even though healthcare is centrally funded and (somewhat) centrally administered.

I worked briefly with a company doing medical transcription. It opened my eyes to how much billing-related paperwork goes on in hospital back offices.