Clinical Coding & Data Quality Improvement Lead in Leatherhead

Key Responsibilities of the role are:

• Clinical Coding Audit & Oversight
  • Lead the delivery of the Trust's clinical coding audit programme, ensuring audit methodology, sampling and reporting comply with national standards and support high-quality clinical coding, patient-level costing and emerging mental health currencies.
  • Analyse audit findings to identify risks, documentation issues and opportunities to improve coding quality, ensuring coded data accurately supports activity reporting, costing, commissioning and future NHS payment models.
  • Act as the programme specialist for clinical coding and data-quality queries, providing advice on the implications for productivity, costing, MHNRGs and statutory data flows.
  • Coordinate improvement programmes arising from audit findings, working with clinical, operational, Finance, Business Intelligence and SITI teams to improve coding quality, documentation standards and organisational readiness for mental health currencies.
  • Ensure coding quality supports accurate derivation of clinical activity, patient-level costing, service line reporting, commissioning datasets and statutory returns, escalating material risks where appropriate.
• Clinical Engagement
  • Work with clinicians and service teams to improve the capture of presenting complaints, ICD-10 diagnoses, SNOMED CT concepts, PROMs, MHSDS data items and complexity factors, ensuring high-quality data is captured.
  • Provide expert coding advice on complex clinical scenarios, ensuring documentation supports accurate coding, reimbursement, commissioning and service planning.
  • Present audit findings and coding intelligence to clinicians and senior leaders, demonstrating the impact of documentation quality on patient safety, mental health currencies, costing and organisational performance.
  • Lead documentation improvement initiatives that strengthen the quality of coded data used for commissioning, benchmarking, patient-level costing and future payment models.
  • Promote understanding of the relationship between clinical documentation, coding, mental health currencies, costing and the Trust's financial sustainability.
• Data Quality & Reporting
  • Lead the analysis and reporting of coding quality and MHSDS data quality, identifying trends, risks and opportunities that support mental health currencies, productivity benchmarking and organisational performance.
  • Analyse the impact of coding quality on activity reporting, currency assignment, commissioning datasets, financial reporting and service line reporting, providing clear recommendations to senior stakeholders.
  • Work with Business Intelligence and Finance to validate coded activity, costing and currency datasets, ensuring they accurately reflect the complexity and delivery of mental health services.
  • Develop assurance reports and dashboards demonstrating the relationship between coding quality, activity, patient complexity, costing, currencies and financial performance.
  • Undertake root-cause analysis to distinguish between clinical documentation, workflow, EPR configuration, coding, extraction and submission issues, agreeing remedial action with the appropriate owner.
  • Monitor implementation of audit recommendations, ensuring improvements are embedded and reflected within organisational reporting.
• Improvement
  • Lead continuous improvement initiatives that strengthen coding quality, documentation standards and the quality of data used to support mental health currencies, patient-level costing and service transformation.
  • Support staff through training and coaching to improve coding consistency and understanding of the wider role coding plays in commissioning, reimbursement and financial sustainability.
  • Share audit findings and emerging risks to improve organisational understanding of the relationship between coding quality, patient complexity and future NHS payment arrangements.
• Governance
  • Act as the Trust's senior specialist for coding governance, ensuring compliance with national coding standards and providing expert advice on the implications for mental health currencies, patient-level costing, commissioning and statutory reporting.
  • Maintain governance arrangements for coding policies, audit processes and assurance documentation, ensuring alignment with national coding standards and emerging NHS payment developments.
  • Monitor developments in clinical coding, mental health currencies and NHS payment mechanisms, assessing implications for the Trust and supporting organisational readiness.
  • Work with EHR and Business Intelligence teams to ensure that agreed improvements in clinical recording flow accurately into MHSDS, the NHS Talking Therapies data set and programme reporting.
  • Work closely with Information Governance, Digital, EHR teams to improve the quality and completeness of clinical data submitted for national reporting and emerging payment models.