Medical billing and coding jobs are constantly being advertised in magazines, on television and the Internet. We received a spam email from an outfit doing business as MyHealthSchoolSearch.com. Be advised that this Web site behaves in an unpredictable manner.
The pitch is that a person can get a job in the field of health care coding. We don’t believe the pitch, but we do understand that medical coding is a discipline of increasing importance. With financial and legal implications attached to each assigned code, professionals and rigorous systems and methods are required. Training is a key component, and it often must be system specific.
This program is a good example of the standard promises most makes: providing skills to find a job, a certificate of completion, and ability to register, prepare, and take a certification examination.
I am not saying this or any online program is unworthy of your attention. However, it is important to remember that as important as training is, on-the-job experience is necessary since many medical coding systems require the operator to have knowledge of a complex piece of software and knowledge of the diagnostic codes.
My view is that medical coding requires specialized expertise and systems tailored to the regulatory requirements in which health care providers, hospitals, and doctors deliver their services.
Access Innovations, developer of the M.A.I. machine assisted indexing system and specialists in complex coding, tagging, and indexing, provides a range of services that deliver tag integrity. Access Innovations provides training to a client’s staff and then offers quality assurance and validation services that can:
- Minimize the risk of a coding error
- Identify inappropriate or inadvertently applied tags
- Display a “map” of coding distributions to allow management to get a bird’s-eye view of the coding assignment flow.
Many widely used tagging systems lack the user friendly interface and may not implement a rigorous ANSI compliant coding subsystem. Access Innovations’ solutions are ANSI compliant and implement state-of-the-art technology to speed tagging and reduce errors. For more information, contact Access Innovations.
If you want to learn medical coding, we suggest you skip the online services that promise the moon. Check your local educational opportunities, such as a university, junior college or vocational school.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Data Harmony, a unit of Access Innovations, the world leader in indexing and making content findable.
