county medical center? what shall you be doing?
Yep. It’s the union job at Hennepin County Medical Center I was really hoping to get
This would be a really good step for me as they are nationally recognized as one of the leading adult and pediatric trauma centers. I would be doing admissions paperwork, patient registration, verifying insurance, checking patients in/out, scheduling appointments, etc. Pretty much Medical Administration. I would like to get my foot in the door here because if I do I can probably pretty much go anywhere. I’d like to work here doing this for a couple years and at the same time work on getting credentialed to become a medical coder because that is what I would really like to do. As a medical coder I would be reading through the doctor’s documentation pulling and piecing all the diagnosis/procedures that were done for each patient visit. Each diagnosis/procedure has a code attached to it and that is how a claim is made that tells the insurance company how much money they owe the hospital. You have to be careful to not upcode (giving a higher paying code for the diagnosis/procedure) or bill the incorrect codes as this is considered fraud. If it wasn’t documented it didn’t happen. You can’t just assume and code something. For example, if you went for a urinary tract infection and your doctor diagnosed you with a UTI but didn’t list the procedure, which in this case would be a test, you can’t code/bill for the test. You would have to query (ask not tell) the doctor to document the test procedure to ensure he performed the test. Also, some of the codes are bundled. For example… if you went in for a surgery and had to get a preoperative or postoperative endoscopy, you wouldn’t bill for the endoscopy as it is part of the “global package” meaning it is included with the surgery. If you were to bill for the surgery and the endoscopy separately then that too could be considered fraud. There are a lot of rules and guidelines you have to follow to code correctly so it is pretty critical that you know what you are doing. Of all the classes I took in college, the coding classes were my favorite. I really enjoyed coding… it was like putting a puzzle together and I’m somewhat of a perfectionist so… I did really well with it. And as you can imagine, there a shit ton of codes. They even have codes that Medicare uses that bills for shit like medical devices/supplies/etc.