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Alicia: This can go really, really fast guys because mainly, what CEUs are, Continuing Education Units- or medical coding continuing education. And if you’ve got a license or certification of any type, you’re going to be expected to get CEUs. It doesn’t matter if you know, you’re a doctor, you’re nurse. When I was a real estate agent, I had to have CEUs for that. When I was teaching in the college, they have educational CEUs. Anywhere from a doctor right to a mechanic, if you’re a certified mechanic, they make you continue… do your continuing education. And the idea is to keep all the new information that’s coming in fresh and so that you don’t become stagnant, that to maintain your medical coding certification, you’re showing that you still know the information you need to know. Or that you’re being updated to all the changes. That’s really what continuing education’s all about.
Medical Coding Continuing Education VIDEO
I think if we scroll down a little bit on that page… the CPC must have… they do theirs every 2 years which is kind of nice. And see, members with apprentice are not required to have 2 year medical coding experience. Let’s see, membership is required to be renewed annually and 36 continuing education units or CEUs must be submitted every two years. For verification and authentication of expertise – that’s ultimately what it’s for.
There’s a link here to the AAPC. Actually, this is to the actual page that tells you what you need to know. The thing about CEUs though for the AAPC… and I know especially when you’re newly certified, again, you want to know. You need 36 CEUs every 2 years. But if you get more than one certification, you will need to get additional CEUs. So look there where it states 2 certifications. They have to get 48 CEUs every 2 years. Laureen is… she’s bi-certified, two certifications, CPC and CPCI. So she has to get 48 CEUs and in addition to that, when you’re CPCI, you have to maintain educational CEUs. And I can’t remember… I think it’s 16 or 8 or something.
Laureen: Yeah, CTs.
Alicia: Yeah, CT teaching. Yeah, I had to get teaching units at the colleg. So 3 certifications, 60 CEUs for… it just goes up and up. So like when you get your Coding Edge magazine and you look, sometimes people wrote articles or you see somebody that has like 5 CEUs behind their name, they’ve got to get 80 every 2 years. So it’s wonderful to have multiple certification but unless you’re employer’s going to pay for your CEUs and your membership and some of that other stuff, you might want to think about if it’s beneficial for you, especially in the beginning, to have multiple certifications. Because you know, it’s going to cost you more. And so think about that.
Now the other thing to mention real quick about the CEUs, let’s say you’re going to get dual membership. You’re going to go through the AAPC and you’re going to go through AHIMA as well. Well, not always do your certifications for the AAPC work for AHIMA and vice versa. I was going to take a great… I want to take this really great bootcamp that I saw and the last… I saw that it was AHIMA-certified so I just assumed it was for the AAPC as well. And I thought, “You know what? I think I’ll just ask just in case.” Good thing I did because the AAPC did not recognize it. And so I would have paid you know, over $1000 for these great… like 16 CEUs and I couldn’t have used them for my CPC certification.
So when you go and you see CEUs offered, make sure they’re approved by who you have your certification with. Now, through CCO, all of our CEUs that are offered through the webinars that Laureen… the E&M and the modifier, they are all approved for CEUs. The Blitz is approved for CEU. So you need to…
Laureen: The Blitz videos isn’t.
Alicia: The Blitz is not, okay. And I’m sure Laureen is working on content and stuff. We’ll be adding new CEU stuff. We have to go through an approval process and there’s a lot of background stuff that has to be done. But your local chapters, every time you go to a meeting, usually offer CEUs. That’s a way to get free ones. The Coding Edge has a little exam that you can go in and take and get like a half a CEU or one CEU I think. And there’s several ways to get them.
But it is a way of life. So know that as soon as you’re certified, that is something that you’re going to want to keep track of. One last point about that, you want to keep track of that and actually keep them in a folder. Laureen was telling me one time, she actually scans hers into her system, into the computer so you can bring them up anytime you want. You need to save them because you could get audited. You need to prove that you’ve you know, keep track of those. So I’ve got a little red binder with… that I keep all of mine in. And that’s just something else you need to…
Laureen: I have a program called Evernote and I just scan all my CEU stuff in there. But you could scan it and just save it on a folder on your hard drive too. As long as you have it to pull it in case you get audited.
Yeah, regarding the CEUs that offers, we call them On Demand classes now because the webinar thing was kind of confusing it. So they’re on demand classes. We’ve got the E&M one and the modifier one right now. We will be adding more titles.
We have attempted to get this webinar approved for CEU but the AAPC has denied it because they said they don’t approve CPC Prep which is kind of interesting because I just taught a Blitz class in Pittsburg and I do it every year and they approve it for CEUs. So they won’t… you know, anyway, I won’t get into the politics of things. But I am trying to see if they will change their minds. We’re kind of compiling a bunch of these webinars to show them that we do cover coding content even if it is a multiple choice question that we’re talking about. We’re talking about coding. So you know, if we subtract out the 30 minutes for the other talk you know, it’s definitely 60 minutes of coding content.
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