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Medical Coding Search Tools
Q: Medical Coding Search Tools / Bubble Highlighting Technique – Can you share your tools for searches, and explain briefly how you “bubble” sections of the CPT?
A: Absolutely, this is one of our claims to fame here. On this webinars, over the years, I will show you how to use Google, and maybe you can do it with other search engines, I’m a Google girl, and I learned this in just trying to market my website better, get listed better with the search engine. It’s a little trick that you can use to search a particular website instead of the whole World Wide Web.
What you want to do is go to Google.com. Some browsers have it built-in so when you type a search in the URL bar, it will do the same thing. What you want to do is type your search term followed by the word “site:” and the website without the www. OK?
Medical Coding Search Tools – Share your Tools for Searches – Video
Here’s some examples: If you wanted to search the CCO website for the phrase “late effect,” you would type in: late effect site:cco.us. And the “site:” and the website are all touching, there’s no spaces. I’m going to copy that to be lazy here, and I’m going to start a new Google search and I’m going to type that in my Google search bar and hit enter. Now, on the top, you’ll still get ads, then you’re going to see every single website. You’ll notice the cco.us, cco.us, cco.us. So, Google limited its search to just our site. This is how we do a lot of our research for this webinar. So, we’ve talked about late effects quite a lot over the years so you can get a feel for the different things that will give you the dates.
Now, if I say, “OK, let me see what AAPC has on this topic” I just swap out the URL, AAPC.com, hit enter. It will show me all information on the AAPC site. I can tell this one is going to be a forum post. You can scroll down and sometimes you’ll see that it’s in one of their blog articles or something like that; so if you put more stock in one of their articles versus people chatting about it on the forum, that will help you with that.
Another thing you can do is like this last one here, “laminectomy with diskectomy” what Google will do is it will look for the word “laminectomy” or the word “diskectomy” and show you all sorts of pages with that. But if you want that exact phrase, put it in quotes.
I’m going to grab this one and show you how that works (“laminectomy with diskectomy” site:aapc.com). I put “laminectomy with diskectomy” as a separate term, and now we can see when we start looking at the results that are in bold “laminectomy with diskectomy.” There wasn’t a whole lot, but it really narrowed my search down using those quotes.
You can put in CPT codes. Sometimes when people are having payment issues, like, why is this code not being paid with that code? Well, put in both CPT codes and do a “site:” search on CCO.us or AAPC, it’s great for CMS.gov. Whatever your favorite site is, and will narrow it down, and you don’t have to try and find where their search engine or scroll through blog articles; so it’s very, very powerful.