There are many who are ambitious about medical coding career and want to take training (CPC-AAPC certification training). As coding is a booming career sector, there are plenty of medical coding training institutes too all around to take advantage of this hype. In fact, when you are planning for a professional training to kick-start a successful career, there are a few things you need to keep in mind in order to be successful.
Not all Training are the same
Even though training topics for CPC certification are the same anywhere you go, the method of training and the exposure you get in professional coding differs from place to place and so as your practical skills as an employable coder.
At the first point, you need to understand that medical coding is not just a certification training like those we do from computer institutes like an MS Office or Graphic Design diploma course. It must be a professional training to make you skilled as a coding specialist with hands-on experience and skill to start practicing.
However, there are many institutes offering medical coding training now, but all of them are not the same. A fresher who wants to enter into a medical coding career will not benefit from a random training in which only theoretical aspects are covered. Getting a mere training certification will not be enough for you start working confidently as a professional coder.
In order to develop employable coding skills, one needs to undergo a practical oriented training to understand real-time work situations and meet the desired performance standards.
What do you learn in Medical coding?
In a comprehensive training program, you will be learning: Medical terminology | All body systems | Medical coding basics | Medical billing basics | ICD-10-CM | CPT | EM Coding | HIPAA | HCPCS | Category II code | MEDICAL BILLING.
How to learn medical coding?
Many of the coding career aspirants believe that having a certification is enough. In fact, typical training institutes offer medical coding training simply as a paper-pencil training as by covering ICD, CPT, and HCPCS books and preparing the students for the CPC exam.
On the other hand, in a real work environment when you have to join a company as a medical coder / biller, one will be working on a computer-based software in which all the references, analysis, and code entries are done online. So, a basic paper-pencil training may not be enough for you to perform well in such a competitive working environment.
To become employable and perform well in a real work environment, you need to get exposure and knowledge in using the coding or RCM (revenue cycle management) software and reference materials, which has to be gained through a real-time computer-based practical training.
So, the first thing to check whether the training institute you approach only offers CPC certification oriented training or offering real RCM software based training. Need not to say, latter should be your ideal choice.
Computer and RCM Software based coding training
As we have seen above, training institutes may only have paper-pencil training, but to get computer based training, you may have to search for a firm which already deals with medical coding and billing work and runs and RCM software.
In Kerala, Spectrum Softtech Solutions is one such option, which is a company functioning in Healthcare IT sector for about two decades now. As the company owns an RCM system for the US healthcare care and offering coding and billing training fully computer based, the trainees get an opportunity to gain some work exposure also along with CPC oriented coding training.
Author bio: Athira is Medical Coding expert and a seasoned trainer with many years of experience in this sector and successfully trained a fair number of coding career aspirants.
