Online Medical Classes

Wanting to take online classes for medical billing and coding...?

is this the way to go? what school would you recommend? please give me some as much info as you can.

Public Comments

1. check out spheris
2. Please realize that there aren't supposed to be too many jobs for the medical biller or coder (or medical assistant) despite what those private $$ career/tech schools say. The field(s) is saturated with graduates from the numerous training programs. With medical billing, a lot of companies are also outsourcing to Asia/India leaving jobs more scarce. Regarding medical coding, the person usually needs a couple of years experience doing coding tasks, certification(s) in the field and preferably completion of an accredited program to possibly get a job. If still interested in training, please consider the more affordable county vo-tech school or community college as long as the program is Accredited within the industry. With schooling, please steer clear of those online, for-profit schools (may have 'bricks and mortar' buildings and may be 'accredited') such as penn foster, capella, university of phoenix, sanford brown, devry, career step, ashworth, strayer, ITT tech, US career, kaplan, remington and others as they are merely out to 'make a profit' (and course credits may Not transfer): http://www.ripoffreport.com and can type into search. US colleges: http://www.utexas.edu/world/univ
3. Look into Career Step. They have a great online medical coding and billing course. They even go through both inpatient and outpatient coding and billing so that you get well rounded training. They have a demo of their course so you can see what it is like and see if you would like it. https://www.careerstep.com/coding/?uid=a1403 After you fill out their form, you can view the demo and get more info about their course. Online is a great option since you can work on it when you have time, rather than going to a class. It is self paced so you have to have the ambition to keep up with it. Their course is about $2,200 and takes about 5 months if you work on it full time. Otherwise it can take up to a year if you work on it less. I've heard that their final exam is harder than the certification exam- which is good! Good luck!
4. Hey Candidily, An online course is great if you don't have the time, resources or desire to take a course at a local college or trade/vocational school. I would also advise you to stay away from the temptation to enroll in what is know in our industry as Educational Clearinghouse (online distance training schools that teach everything from accounting to zoology. These types of schools are clearly identified in jannsody's post above). Before you start asking which courses someone recommends you first have to ask yourself “What are my goals once I complete the course”? Are you going to be looking to work in a hospital, clinic, insurance company, etc or are you going to start a home based medical billing business? The other thing you must consider is that courses differ greatly in price and that is mostly attributed to what the course consists of, the time it will take to complete, what they award you with once the course is complete (certificate/certification/degree) and lastly a services they provide you with after the course is complete (resume assistance, job searches, apprenticeship, etc.) I have seen courses range from $1K – as high as $4,200. I own a medical billing and transcription business and I tell those that ask me not to take an online course that is less than $600 and no more than $2,000 unless you are actually learning two or more of the professions (billing+coding, coding+transcription, billing+coding+transcription). There's a lot of stuff you need to consider when researching online medical billing courses and while I can't go into them here because of time limitations I will give you the link to a website that does a superb job of breaking it all down in easy to understand language (link is after my name below). Best of luck to you, Lori http://medicalbillingbooks.tripod.com/medical-billing-training-courses.html http://medicalbillingbooks.tripod.com/medical-billing-books-boxset.html