Let’s talk about the mental side of being a coder – and the stress that quietly (or not so quietly) tags along with it.
Every day, coders are asked to make what feels like thousands of decisions. Did the physician clarify that suspected diagnosis in the discharge summary, or was it left hanging in limbo? The provider keeps documenting a urinary tract infection (UTI), but the culture came back negative; do we code it or query it? Condition A and Condition B both seem to justify the admission, but which one gets sequenced first? The questions keep coming, and that’s just before lunch.
Then, after clocking out, the real-life decisions kick in:
At some point, the brain simply short-circuits, and the only thing you feel qualified to decide is what Netflix show to fall asleep to. Recently, I came across a term that sums up this feeling perfectly: decision fatigue.
According to Google’s trusty Copilot, decision fatigue is a “psychological phenomenon that occurs when a person makes numerous decisions in a short period, leading to psychological and emotional exhaustion. It results in a deterioration in the quality of decisions made, as the mental strain from the burden of choices can deplete one’s ability to make sound judgments.”
Yep. That’s me by 6 pm. And because I’m a coder, through and through, my next thought was, “Is there a code for that?”