What Type of Person Is Ideal For
Medical Billing And Coding?

Video Transcript

Host Question:
What career skills do you think you need to be successful in the world of medical billing and coding?

Guest Answer:
You have to be curious. You have to be like Sherlock Holmes. And if you like jigsaw puzzles or if you like puzzles of any kind, that kind of thing. That’s all very helpful stuff because you have a natural mind for curiosity and for solving things, seeing patterns. You want to be able to look at that overall documentation. The other thing is you have to come in to the job in the right mindset that you are a partner with the provider. For most of us, some people work on the insurance side, but when you’re working on the provider side, you want to partner with that provider and you want to be able to. You’ll start seeing trends in how they do their notes.

Guest Answer:
You need to be an organized and focused person. You have to be willing to read and learn on a regular basis. This isn’t something that you learn. And then you’re like, you know, for the rest of your life, you constantly learning. You also have to be able to communicate with all kinds of people on all levels of your team, your patients who may know nothing about medical billing and coding your counterparts and colleagues and your health care providers. So we’re talking on a different level, on a more scientific level about medicine. You have to be able to understand the medical terminology and be able to read all that medical documentation, have an idea of what it says. Then you have to be able to make the translation and understand the technical manuals, which are what medical coding is. Essentially understanding the translation between that medical terminology and the technical manuals of coding. The rules and regulations that are associated with that. You have to understand medical insurance. The health care insurance industry makes the rules about not whether your patient can have a procedure done, but whether the insurance company’s going to pay for the procedure to be done. So you have to understand how they are working, and then you have to also understand the technology of creating a claim, transmitting it, because that’s now 95% done electronically. And then you have to have some accounting knowledge to be able to understand whether the money’s right, how to apply it to patients accounts and do a count reporting.

Guest Answer:
Time management is going to be a big one. Prioritization and attention to detail. This is a very detail oriented career field, so that’s going to be a big one. But don’t worry if you feel like these aren’t your strong suits because all of these things can be learned.

Guest Answer:
You definitely want to be friendly, nice to the providers. You want to have their rapport and their relationship with the clients as well. You want to be as courteous as you can to the actual letter, which like would be the insurance companies like Mr Manning’s that are. But you need that because in this one of business. Our patients and our occupation of health care. It’s not always the greatest means that they risk. So you always want to give them a little bit of light and shine bright for anyone that crosses your path.

Guest Answer:
You need a strong backbone. You need to be able to give and take constructive criticism. You need to know what you’re talking about and not be afraid of doctors. You cannot have, like, white coat syndrome, you know. You have to go talk to them and say, “hey, did you really do this? Because this does not look like you did what you were telling me you did at all.” And you have to have an assertive personality, can’t be passive, and then you don’t want to come off too strong and ruffle everybody’s feathers up.