The competition has now been successfully held three times. Since 2024, the medical record team of the Fourth People’s Hospital of Shenzhen has actively participated and demonstrated outstanding performance for two consecutive years. In the second edition of the competition in 2024, our team achieved excellent results in their debut appearance. The coders LI Maoting and CHEN Miaoyin each won Second Prize in the individual competition.

　　In the third edition of the competition in 2025, the competition introduced a team event for the first time. Our hospital once again sent a strong team to compete. In the individual competition, LI Maoting and CHEN Miaoyin maintained their excellent performance, each winning Second Prize again. In the team event, the representative team, composed of coders LI Maoting, CHEN Miaoyin, and LIANG Yumei, demonstrated strong teamwork and composure, ultimately winning the Team Excellence Award. This achievement has placed our hospital among the city’s leading medical institutions in medical record management. 

　　The competition was divided into individual and team events and adopted a dual assessment model combining theoretical knowledge and practical skills. The participants need to compete in multiple categories, including the medical record management, the International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10), the International Classification of Procedures (ICD-9-CM-3), medical record quality monitoring, medical statistics, electronic medical records, DRG/DIP-related knowledge, as well as clinical medicine, anatomy, and relevant laws and regulations. The competition focused on evaluating participants’ coding accuracy, clinical reasoning ability, and teamwork skills. Our hospital’s ability to achieve outstanding results for two consecutive years in such a highly competitive field fully reflects the Medical Records Room’s strong emphasis on coding quality, data standardization, and team building in daily work. It also demonstrates the early positive results of the hospital’s ongoing efforts in the quality control of the first page data of the medical record and professional talent development.

Leveraging Competition to Boost High-Quality Hospital Development

　　With the continuous updates to the AccreditationStandards for Grade III Hospitals and the ongoing reforms of DRG/DIP-based medical insurance payment methods, the accuracy and completeness of first page data of the medical record have become a core foundation for hospital quality management, performance evaluation, and medical insurance settlement. The Fourth People’s Hospital of Shenzhen will leverage this competition as an opportunity to further drive medical record management toward specialization, standardization, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

　　Introducing a system where medical record coders are assigned to specific clinical departments, facilitating closer integration of coding and clinical work. Each coder regularly works with designated departments, forming a stable and continuous “clinical–coding collaboration units.” Through regular communication and two-way training, this approach ensures standardized completion of first page data of the medical record and accurate selection of primary diagnoses, thereby structurally enhancing the quality of first page data.

　　Strengthening specialized training for coders to cultivate “clinically-oriented coders.” Coders assigned to specific departments regularly spend time in their designated clinical departments strengthening communication with physicians and, in turn, promoting the integration between ICD coding with clinical work. This initiative aims to cultivate a specialized team of coders with both coding expertise and clinical knowledge, thereby improving coding accuracy and ensuring that coding more accurately reflects actual clinical conditions.

　　Optimizing management processes to support high-quality hospital development. Based on the department-based responsibility mechanism for coders, the hospital will continue to improve medical record management processes, providing accurate, reliable, and timely data support for key tasks such as hospital grade accreditation, public hospital performance evaluations, DRG/DIP-based medical insurance payment, and clinical pathway optimization. Ultimately, this will help improve both hospital management and the specialty development.

　　The award is not only a recognition of the hospital’s medical records team’s professional expertise, but also a reflection of the hospital’s ongoing efforts to strengthen the quality of its medical record management that can support its high-quality development. Looking ahead, the Fourth People’s Hospital of Shenzhen will continue to uphold the principle of prioritizing quality and leveraging data-driven decision-making, continually improving medical record management and providing a more reliable data support for hospital operations management and clinical decision-making.