When it comes to medical coding, there are two medical coding certifications that are known to be more prominent and widely recognized than others. AAPC’s CPC and AHIMA’s CCS-P are the two most widely recognized medical coding certifications. CPC is an acronym for Certified Professional Coder offered by the American Association of Professional Coders (AAPC). CCS-P stands for Certified Coding Specialist-Physician, which is offered by the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA).

When it comes to choosing between these two well known medical coding certifications, there are some factors to be considered to enable you make the best choice. Below are some of the major similarities and differences between AAPC’s CPC and AHIMA’s CCS-P.

Coding is known to be of two types, which are Facility coding and Professional coding. The first thing you ought to do when choosing your most preferred coding certification is to decide which of these coding types appeals to you the most. Facility coding has to do with the type of coding carried out on inpatient services. These are mostly patients who are on admission in hospitals. Facility coders are known to work mainly in hospitals generally. Both have their challenges and advantages, so it really depends on which environment and skills you’d like to acquire in your medical coding career.

When we talk of professional coding, we mean the type of coding carried out on outpatients as part of outpatient services. Some of these outpatient services that require professional coding include; emergency medicine, surgery centers, private practices, etc. Professional coders are known to work mainly in doctors’ offices.

When it comes to the two types of coding certifications mostly used, the CPC medical coding certification can be said to be more or less a professional coding certification. This makes it most suitable for people who are considering careers in surgery centres or in medical private practices.

The CCS-P medical coding credential on its part is known to be more or less a facility coding certification. This makes it ideal for people with dreams of pursuing careers in hospitals.

Another important factor worthy of note are the certification exams. For both the AAPC and AHIMA, you’ll need to sit for and pass a very lengthy exam as a necessary requirement. The standard in medical coding is high and there is a huge demand for highly qualified and proficient coders.

For the CPC exam, you will have to sit for a 150 multiple choice question exam. To sit for this medical coding certification exam, you must be a member of the AAPC with an annual membership fee of $120.00. The fee for the CPC is estimated at $300.00 and lasts for about 340 minutes. You will be offered two chances to take the CPC exam.

For the AHIMA CCS-P exam, you will have to sit for the 4 hour exam in two parts. The first part of the exam requires you to attempt 60 multiple choice questions in one hour. The other part of the exam will take you 3 hours that requires you to attempt real medical record coding. Coding these records accurately is a necessary requirement for passing this second part. Sitting for the CCS-P does not require AHIMA membership, though you will end up paying a higher exam fee if you are a non-member.

The membership fee for AHIMA is $165.00 and to sit for the CCS-P exams as an AHIMA member, you must pay a $320.00 exam fee. The exam fee for non-members is $405.00. This fee offers you only one chance of sitting and passing the CCS-P exams whether you are a member or a non-member.

The CPC exam is arguably the easier between the two, but by no means it’s a pushover. Both exam passing rates can be depressing news for first time exam-takers, but with the proper coaching, practice, tips and strategies most will be able to pass the exam the first time. It is common for medical coding students to get both coding certifications to give them an edge over other medical workers with one coding certification. With both CPC and CCS-P certification, you can move between facility and professional coding without much fuss and make yourself highly desirable as a certified medical coder.

If you’ve made it this far in this post, congratulate yourself because here’s the good news: you can use certain study guides to prepare yourself for the AAPC CPC exam as well as the AHIMA CCS-P exam. Not any study guide will do, as it needs to be comprehensive enough to accommodate both certifications.

For more than ten years, instructor Pamela Biffle CPC, CPC-I, CHCC, CHCO has been preparing folks to pass the Certified Professional Coder exam, so we were thrilled when she agreed to share some of her sage advice with us.

Think Like a Teacher

Biffle teaches coders who are fresh out of college classrooms, as well as coders with lots of on-the-job experience who want to boost their careers with a CPC. And despite their inexperience, coders right out of college classes have an initial edge when it comes to the exam, she reports.

That’s because folks who’ve been in school recently have learned to “think like teachers” because their success in class has been tied to how well they can predict the kinds of things their instructors will put on quizzes and exams. But experienced coders – who are more used to the real world – can develop an edge of their own if they spend some time developing CPC exam skills, says Biffle, who devotes most of the classes she teaches for Coding Cert to test taking.

Biffle advises experienced coders to forget the idiosyncratic guidelines from carriers while taking the exam. To answer the CPC questions correctly, you must rely on the official guidelines in your ICD-9 and CPT manuals, and some coders who’ve been dealing with carriers a lot aren’t as familiar with the official guidelines as they need to be to pass the exam.

Can you answer this sample CPC exam question?

When teachers are writing multiple choice exams, they often like to include a choice that’s really wrong (a gimme), a choice that’s wrong, and a couple choices that are plausible, Biffle explains. And the folks who write the CPC think like teachers too. You can save yourself time during the exam if you eliminate the “wrong, wrong, dead wrong choices right away,” she says. As you choose among the more plausible answers, it helps to consider what coding principle the question is trying to test you on.

Let’s look at how this works with this simple CPC exam sample question.

Provide the correct ICD-9-CM code for choledocholithiasis with obstruction.

A. 574.50

B. 574.51

C. 574.91

D. 574.90

The correct answer is B. To understand how to get through a question like this quickly, let’s turn to the 574.xx section of our ICD-9 manual.

If we look at the pink box under 574 (Cholelithiasis), we read that we use the 5th digit 0 for “without mention of obstruction” and the 5th digit 1 for “with obstruction.” Because the question mentions “with obstruction,” we immediately have two “wrong, wrong, dead wrong” answers – Answers A and D, which have the 5th digit 0.

A lot of CPC exam questions are trying to get you to look at details in the coding scenario to choose properly among codes. Unlike some doctors’ documentation (which can be vague, as seasoned coders know), the exam questions tell you what you need to know to select the right code.

Private Label rights or PLR is a suffix used to describe articles that can be bought for as less as 15 to 20 cents each. They are good means to add search engine friendly content to your site at the same time making it more useful and interesting.

You might be in need of a lot of articles if you are building a large website or writing for forums or blogs or submitting to article directories. It would be time consuming and very very expensive to keep building new articles all the time.

One way to go about it is to hire writers using any of the freelance sites like Rent a coder or get a coder. If you have tried it already, you will realize that it is not as easy as it sounds.

Another route you could take is to take a shortcut through PLR articles provided by many websites that work on membership basis. However the membership to these sites is strictly limited. These websites offer good and well written articles for as little as 15c to 20c per article which may cost up to $5 – $7 to produce.

These articles may be used by several others too. The beauty here is that these articles can be rewritten or altered slightly to suit your subject and keyword densities and then published as new. All rights pertaining to these articles are given away to you and you can do with them as you wish. The membership to these PLR article sites is limited because of the fact that not many people can be given access to the same articles, lest they be published one too many times.

This PLR system of using articles in the long run turns out be a bargain because of the low cost of the articles, saving cost and good results because of the high quality of these articles. One may ask, hoe the PLR sites can afford to give away articles for so less? They can afford to, because, they are getting their cost back by selling the articles multiple times.

A little bit of rewriting is strongly recommended because; you need to optimize these articles with your keywords and at the same time, adjust the keyword density. This little rewriting exercise will also lend uniqueness to these articles, at the same time adding a tone and your personality.

Many webmasters may take the route of publishing these articles as they are, or just by adding an introduction and an ending. Many also use RSS feds to add content to their web pages.

Whatever you may want to do, spending 15c to 20c on an article, will give you a skeleton in the first place and help you to build upon the already existing idea, thus saving time and cost.

Many PLR sites advertise saying that they have only 200 or 300 memberships left and right now maybe there are 20 -30 available. Don’t decide by these hypes; check out their samples and topics that they offer articles on, before deciding.

Medical Coding is a growing industry that offers a lot of potential for employers and job seekers alike. For the past few years, this industry has been considered one of the few lucrative job markets. The main task of Medical coders is to apply codes to different healthcare services and procedures and then send them to the insurance companies for payment. Just like any other field, this field also has some advantages and disadvantages that are discussed below, and any firm that wishes to adopt medical coding or any employee who seeks employment in this field must be aware of them.

The primary advantage of this field is the growth rate. Because of the high growth rate, this industry has a high demand for medical coders, and by 2014, it will start to grow faster than the average rate. Thus, it is a lucrative job market for today as well as for the times to come. The second primary advantage of this field is ‘Work from Home’ opportunity. Since most of the employers follow this, the employees have the advantage to work from home conveniently.

Another benefit of medical coding is for the insurance companies who get everything in a specific pattern. The technical language of medicine is converted into an easy language of numbers and codes. Medical coders can specialize in a specific medical field and get a certification for it. They even have opportunities of advancement, depending on their education and continuous trainings etc.

Just like any other field, medical coding also has certain disadvantages. People who want to take up this career must be aware of these disadvantages, so that they can career plan accordingly. First of all, fresh medical coders usually have difficulty in breaking into this industry, since most of the firms have specific experience requirements.

Medical coding might also require you to relocate to another part of the world or another city or state. That way, you might be able to advance in your career but you might have trouble in settling down to a new work and domestic environment.

Medical coding is a relatively new industry, having a lot of potential and scope. However, it must be kept in mind that like any other job market, this market also has certain positives and negatives that an employee has to bear with. People who are considering a career in this field must be aware of these and prepare themselves accordingly.

Medical billing and coding is one of the hottest medical professions in great demand with a great deal of job opportunities and rooms for promotion. Promotion will come with increment in pay and added benefits. It always helps to open up a lot of new and excellent opportunities as your value is highly recognized with this promotion.

However how can anyone be in the rightful position to earn for the promotion? What are the key criteria for one to be upgraded to the next level? What are the prerequisite for the job promotion? Here are a few key guidelines for anyone who hope to get a medical and coding job promotion in the near future.

a. Get yourself into the medical coding and billing educational program, preferably from a renowned University with world-wide recognition in the medical billing and coding field. Target for at least one associate degree in this field to create a good opportunity for yourself.

b. Get yourself a specialized certificate in medical coding and billing to sharpen your medical billing skills. Do not be contended with just an associated degree, instead you should try to out shine yourself whenever you can because there may be hundreds of medical coding and billing graduates just like you who are also seeking for related medical jobs in the market. Even if you are already working as a medical biller and wish to increase your proficiency as a medical biller or coder, seeking for this professional course will definitely help to enhance your competency in every component of the medical billing and coding process.

c. Equip yourself with the necessary computer skills to increase your computer proficiency because having good computer skills especially in MS Office is one of the pre-requisite of this profession. Being computer savvy will definitely increase your chance to get the promotion that you have been waiting for.

d. Gain great experience by trying your hands in all elements in medical coding and billing field by exposing yourself to any of possible opportunities in learning new stuffs even if they are not what you are responsible for officially in your current work place. In some case, you may proactively volunteer yourself to replace your colleagues if need to be away from the office for a short duration and is looking for someone to replace them for the mentioned period.

e. Register yourself in the RHIT examination (Registered Health information Technician), employers are more likely to hire and promote someone which had passed this exam.

f. Always stay acquainted with the latest career news by reading weekly career publication articles and news, and be attentive and conscious with your company news and its competitors at the same time. Keep high awareness on the company’s new directions, strategies or market opportunities; always look out for possible ways to improve the company’s image, reputation, and brands in the market.

g. Other than equipping yourself with the knowledge and skill-sets in medical coding and billing, you should also review some of those areas, such as: how to improve your leadership skills, how to improve one’s communication skills, how to be of career competency, how to handle internal conflicts among team members conflicts and a lot more. This is to make sure you are always be prepared if there are any good promotion opportunities for any team leadership role.

I taught myself HTML back in the mid-nineties and was proud of the fact that I was able to accomplish the design of fairly complex web pages with nothing more than a starter HTML book, an HTML reference book, and the knowledge I had stored in my head. But back in those days, we web designers had what looking back was a fairly limited amount of tools with which to work, and the quality (or lack thereof) of sites on the web was lackluster at best.

Fast-forward to today: The hand-coder has more powerful and intuitive software packages available that will still allow us “to get our hands dirty”, which brings us to the purpose of this article. With the standardization of the much anticipated Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in the late-nineties, the web design community has become familiar with a much more powerful and precise method of web page layout.

“But how is an old-time web coder supposed to learn CSS the easy way?!” Well, I say you should learn it the way I, and countless others, have:

1. Download the Firefox browser

2. Install the Web Developer extension

3. Open one of your “old” HTML files

4. View the source, click the “Cleanup the page” button

5. Check the “replace FONT…..tags by CSS” box, then Refresh

Now you have a very neat and tidy piece of code, with all the CSS dirty work done for you! At this point you can copy & paste the resulting code and use it in your project and start figuring out what it’s doing. I was amazed at how easily I was able to pick it up and start making changes on my own. When I wanted more information on a certain style it was a just a Google search away to many excellent CSS resources on the web. I find it much easier to learn CSS if I get to apply the modifications to the existing code that I’ve been working on, and I think you will too.

I hope you find this article helpful and if you follow these steps you should be able to add CSS to your web site design toolbox in no time!

Congratulations on completing your professional medical coder training. A career in the medical coding field is a great choice! However, to become a certified professional coder, you must now gain CPC certification by taking & passing the medical coding exam, either the (CCS-P exam) Certified Coding Specialist-Physician Based exam or the (CPC exam) Certified Professional Coder exam.

Are you starting to feel a sense of dread as the CPC certification exam date gets closer? Has your enthusiasm for taking the CPC test waned from the time you first started studying? Are you just feeling overwhelmed with it all?

The fact is the following symptoms are very common:

• The feeling that you may not be prepared for the pass or fail exam (70% correct minimum!)
• Managing your study time feels difficult and stressful?
• Do you doubt you will be able to complete the CPC test in the allotted 5 and a half hours?

… are you freaking out with the thought of failing your next attempt at your CPC exam!

Well you are not alone… my name is Laureen Jandroep (CPC) and I was the same position that you are now. I remember a time when I was feeling completely overwhelmed, sitting in a hotel room going over a CPC practice exam with the CPC test hovering over me like a dark cloud just days in the future. My job was at stake. I absolutely had to pass the exam. I feel your pain, believe me!

This may be your first time taking the CPC test or perhaps you failed before and this is your second or third time around trying for your CPC certification. In either case, you may be desperate for any technique that you could use to improve your chances of passing the CPC exam. Well, I have some good news for you…Forget about exam overwhelm, I have a solution.

The CPC test really doesn’t need to be that difficult. You don’t need to stress. After all, it’s an open book exam, right? All you need is to get yourself organized and focus on the elements that are the most critical to passing the test… and don’t sweat the small stuff!

When I took the exam the cpc study guides available were just not helpful, There is an much simpler way! 12 Hours of Streaming CPC Exam Prep Videos ONLINE, available Immediately. Plus a cpc coding exam review 2011 bonus: CPC Exam Training also on DVD. I urge you to take a look for yourself, let me help you pass the exam once & for all. I promise you this is the best CPC exam prep available anywhere. You “will” pass the CPC exam & get your CPC certification.

Urgent care is, as the name suggests about services which are required for an illness or injury that would not result in further disability or death if not treated immediately, but does need professional attention as it has the potential to develop such a threat if the treatment is delayed longer than 24 hours. Many new urgent care services are cropping up by the day across the nation. It is necessary to follow a proper billing and coding process so that all claims are reimbursed and no claim gets lost. However billing mistakes commonly do happen in urgent care billing services and claims can get rejected for various reasons. The reasons include,

It is true that there is often a shortage of urgent care specialized coders but one must remember that wrong coding can delay payments or even lead to litigation.

It is a fact that the major factor with respect to expectations regarding the medical billing and coding salary currently paid by doctors, physicians, and medical facilities and institutions, is directly related to training, schooling, and experience.

This should not be a deterrent for an individual seeking a career in the medical coding and billing sector of the healthcare industry, an industry which has an increasing abundance of current job opportunities, and provides tremendous opportunities for advancement, and in turn increased earnings. Someone looking for a career as opposed to a job, should seriously consider enrolling in an online billing and coding course at bare minimum as it will not only open the door to more job opportunities, but have a significant effect on medical billing and coding salary paid.

Salaries for medical billers and medical coders are generally about the same. If we take for example the average medical coding salary for an uncertified medical coder, it falls within the range of $36,000 to $40,000 per year. The same position for a certified medical coder pays an average of $43,000 to $47,000 per year. As you can see, education and ultimately certification has a dramatic impact on medical billing and coding salary, tremendous financial benefits over the long run.

The overall demand for medical billers and coders is rapidly increasing as medical practitioners and facilities are now seeing great value in hiring or outsourcing competent billers and coders. After all, this function, performed in an effective and efficient manner ensures that they get reimbursed by healthcare insurance providers promptly. The trend seems to be outsourcing as the doctors and medical institutions pay only for work completed and do not have to incur costs for benefit and other employee expenses.

The other primary factor which has an effect on medical billing and coding salary is geographical location. Like any industry, the demand is higher in certain parts of the country, thus paying medical billers and coders a higher amount, and lower in other parts of the country, thus paying a lower rate. In general, the East and West Coasts pay $4,000 to $6,000 higher than the Midwest and the South.

Again, this should not stop individuals from pursuing a career as a medical biller or coder if they live in a lower paying area.. As a result of the outsourcing trend, medical billers and medical coders can in many cases work out of their home, meaning that an individual living in the Midwest can solicit and secure clients in higher demand, higher paying areas of the country.

In summation, medical billing jobs and medical coding jobs provide excellent opportunities for anyone looking for a well paying career with unlimited future advancement. Like any job or career, what you put in is what you get out. It is important develop and protect your reputation right from the outset. Perform quality work, do it accurately, and do it promptly. This coupled with education and certification will ensure that you maximize the medical billing and coding salary you attain.

There are many different types of programmers that perform software development. Or is it computer programming? Or is it coding? These are all labels or boxes we use to classify people and their skillsets. Much like we distinguish between testers, coders, managers, architects, designers, CLO etc only these are much more obvious. So what exactly makes a coder a coder or a programmer a programmer? We may loosely use them interchangeably to mean the same thing but from an outside perspective I like to think of them as badges or stripes. Something you earn with time, patience, wisdom and experience.

Some people just have certain qualities about them that make them good, bad, better or worse than the next person. In order to simply determine what these might be, I propose five boxes or labels.

1. The tool user

The tool user is the least experienced of them all. He has enough knowledge to poke around tools like Visual Studio 2005 and whack together a GUI simply by dragging and dropping widgets onto a form. To somebody that doesn’t know better, because he produces results that often look compelling (brought about by the efforts of the tool and not his own doings), they think highly of him and/or his constructions. Why the term construction and not production or development? Well he doesn’t really develop anything. He constructs things with the use of ever increasingly sophisticated tools. Good management that is cluey or tech savy will see past this but unfortunately (or fortunately for the better programmers of the world) he still finds his place.

This is the worst kind of software developer. When something under the hood breaks or he/she needs to modify behaviour to do anything substantial, forget it.

Languages of choice: Would it really matter? It’s all gibberish
Software of choice: Any and all RAD tools that provide rapid development of clicky interfaces

2. The hacker

The hacker has moved beyond the notion of expecting tools to do all the work for him. He possesses basic or rudimentary development skills. No knowledge of compiled languages but understands scripting languages well enough to piece bits and pieces together. He can usually copy and paste scripts and tweak variables and functions. He doesn’t usually understand the big picture of developing anything but he can hack at something he is given with pot luck. He trolls the web an forums looking for code snippets to do what he wants and pieces them together.

Languages of choice: Javascript, html, css, maybe limited php understanding
Software of choice: Simple text editors, maybe text editors that provide syntax highlighting

3. The programmer

The programmer has a good understanding of what it is to code and write software. He doesn’t rely on tools so much as his own understanding of the languages. He isn’t so phased about the tools he isues as he realises the tools aren’t going to do the job for him. This oversight however blinds him from realising the benefits they can provide to a more experienced programmer.

This unfamiliarity with tools and libraries; a result of limited exposure and experience in the wider field, over shadows him from the bigger project environments that require versioning control, many developers and larger environments. He’s just not familiar with it. Similarly, whilst a capable programmer, he doesn’t necessarily think about how others will use what he writes and as such, doesn’t really fit into the team building environment. He is a skilled ‘lone programmer’. He might have skills, but nobody can work with him because he doesn’t think above or below the line of code he writes.

Languages of choice: C++, Java, C#, Visual Basic

4. The developer

The developer is an experienced programmer who understands there is much more to developing software than the lines of code it consists of. He possesses a much better understanding of software design concepts and principles than the programmer and thinks about a problem in its entirety. Whilst he has a good understanding of this problem and is open to seeing it from most angles, he doesn’t necessarily understand the entire domain to which it applies.

With experienced programming skills he doesn’t rely on tools but uses them to increase productivity.

Languages of choice: Generally prefers managed code over unmanaged code as he realises the productivity boost that comes with it.
Software of choice: The big development IDE’s; anything that provides intelligence, syntax highlighting, code snippets, templates, formatting etc.

5. The architect

The architect is the crème of the crop. He’s a primed software developer with ten plus years of experience under the belt. He’s passed well beyond just the technical side of developing software and understanding good solution design. He can walk into a business domain and connect up the dots people inside the domain couldn’t. Leaning on many years of experience on what works and what doesn’t, he’s often hired out as a consultant for his valued expertise.

This much broader, yet specialised skill set puts him in high demand. When a company wants to bring in the big guns and call in a consultant. This is the guy.

Languages of choice: Programming was something left to his youth, his consulting services require him to write very few lines of code.
Software of choice: Modelling tools, metric tools and tools for comparative purposes.

What types of programmers have you met/worked with in your walk of life?