Despite the negative attention Obamacare has had recently, Obamacare will also help create many new jobs in the healthcare arena in our country due to the shortage of coders in the healthcare industry. Under Obamacare, roughly 40 million new patients will enter our healthcare system and that will create the need to code hundreds of millions of new charts each year. Under ICD-10 productivity estimates, a coder will take half an hour to code an average outpatient chart and an hour on average to code an inpatient chart. Think of the millions of new coders and billers that will have to be hired within the healthcare industry over the next 5 years.
