Becoming a Certified Coding Associate!

What a hiatus I was on!  Thank you for your patience while I got my life in order!  I have spend the last two and a half years as a student at my local community college.  I finally made a choice and answered that age-old question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
My answer? A medical coder!

Training to become a medical coder was not hard, in fact it came pretty natural to me.  Craziest thing about it is I know I have number and letter dyslexia!  How can someone who transposes numbers/letters do something as number/letter heavy and important as this? Easy, we triple check our work!


Now I'm sure most of you have NO CLUE what a medical coder is or what a medical coder does... so let me give you a scenario and some information!  Lets say grandma goes to the hospital because she fell and broke her hip.  We want grandma to only be charged/billed for fixing her broken hip right?  So to prevent grandma getting a bill for a breast enlargement/vagina to penis surgery when she didn't have that done we use medical codes to correctly bill for what occurred.  There is a medical code for everything from grandma's falling and breaking her hip, to George's change to Georgette.  As a medical coder, it will be my job to ensure that we code everything correctly.  We don't want to overbill or underbill for any procedure and we don't want to say someone has cancer in their medical history when they were only getting a scan for it.  Coders can control what goes on your medical history for your whole life, from how you came into the world (V30.00) to how you left it (434.01) I can code pretty much any medical phenomenon there is.  I can code it in Current Procedural Terminology (CPT) or in International Classification of Diseases (ICD)  Of course in CPT it's all procedures and in ICD it's all conditions/diseases and where they are on/in the body.

Soon we will get to be more specific as we join the rest of the world in using ICD 10!

Medical coding is something I've grown to love going through the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) certified program at my college.  It's a job that can be accomplished both in an office or at home.  I hope, one day, to code from home making bank in my pjs sipping on all the Gevalia! 

Delicious sweet nectar...

Just yesterday (August 1st, 2013) I braved and passed the Certified Coding Associate (CCA) exam.  This is my foot in the door at many jobs.  Technically giving me the title of "Coder 1" in many facilities.  While I'm at the bottom rung of the coding ladder, there's no where to go but up from here (and I'm actually on the stinking ladder!)  I'm so excited to get to work in the medical profession and not have to see or smell poo, urine, or vomit... but power to those of you who do!

With that I will be rejoining Geek Juice and posting more reviews more often!  I'm sorry I was gone for so long, but now that I'm certified, I should have a little more free time since I'm not studying anymore!