Medical coding and billing clerks calculate charges, develop bills, and prepare them to be mailed to customers. Billing clerks review hospital records, purchase orders, sales tickets, or charge slips to calculate the total amount due from a customer. A hospital’s billing clerk may need to contact an insurance company to determine what items will be reimbursed.
Articles on this page have been submitted by a medical coding and billing clerk at Decatur Memorial Hospital.
In the last installment, I talked to you about how I grew into my position over the past five years and how I continued my education toward graduating from Richland Community College with certificates in Coding and Transcription.
This month, I want to go into more detail about how we take patient demographic information and scan it for use with insurance and the overall verification process.
The patient's demographic information, along with specific procedure and diagnosis, are put onto a 'bubble form'. We use a system called Codescan to scan these forms. Once the forms have been scanned, they are filtered to ensure information accuracy. Incorrect information, such as a diagnosis that will not validate a procedure being performed, is fixed and then electronically sent to the insurance companies.
The final step is to run a charge summary through the system to ensure that each bubble form that was scanned into Codescan has properly flowed into the patient's account.
I love my job, but there is another educational step that I am considering. Because I want to further advance in this field, I am considering becoming certified by taking a coding examination test, which will require a lot of preparation. The only hesitation I have is that this test covers the entire medical spectrum as opposed to just cardiac. As you can see, the learning never has to stop, it just prepares you for so much more.
I am looking forward to sharing more next month.
One of the reasons that healthcare is an exciting field is that there are numerous opportunities for career growth. I want to tell you about my career in medical coding and billing, but first, I want to share with you how my career has evolved over the past few years.
I began my career almost five years ago as a front office assistant. I answered the phone, scheduled appointments, checked patients in as they arrived for their appointments, and made sure those appointments were billed.
As the practice grew, I was asked if I would mind learning how to do the hospital coding and billing. I was nervous in the beginning because this was a part of the job I knew little about. That question turned out to be the one that changed my career path.
I spent several months learning cardiac terminology, procedures, diagnoses and the billing codes that pertained to the physicians over which I was in charge. At that point, I decided it would be a good idea to enroll at Richland Community College. I took night courses and graduated with certificates in Coding and Transcription. After achieving those accomplishments, I was given my own office with my very own title.
The two general cardiologists for whom I bill do a very good job of keeping good records of who they see, when they see them, and what service was provided at each encounter. Our office is paperless, so each patient has his/her own account set up in our computer system. My job is to verify that the information listed on the billing face sheet is in fact correct and matches what our system lists.
Next month, I will go into more detail about scanning forms and a future career step I am considering. As time goes on, I hope you will realize that the more you learn, the more exciting your career can become.
See you next month.