What is the difference between Soft and Hard Coding?

In many cases, a patient may have unique circumstances that are outliers to standard practice in a healthcare facility. To ensure that a hospital gets compensated for their work, billing and coding is done so that charges can be made and sent to agencies to cover the cost.

For circumstances that are standards of practice, Hard Coding is done through the CDM, Charge Description Master, which is a tool hospital use to find, place and document services being used.

For circumstances that are unique and difficult, Soft Coding is done which requires a coding profession to manually document the services being used.

In most healthcare facilities, Hard Coding is primarily used. Soft Coding would require a coding professional which not all healthcare facilities may have employed especially in smaller settings.