In most hospital settings, assigning a clinical code for an identified cause of death is the responsibility of medical records personnel.
In such a scenario, your primary responsibility as an attending/certifying physician would be to correctly identify and fill in the cause of death – that is, one that can be coded/ has a code.
This would assist the medical records department personnel in coding accurately for purposes of analysis and reporting of the relevant epidemiology of causes of death.
However, in select hospitals, the physicians may be responsible for filling in death certificates as well as assigning the codes. In both settings, but more so in the latter, it is vital to understand the basic concepts related to coding and learn the skills of assigning correct codes to the causes of death.
