What is a Medical Coding Auditor | HCC Coding

Q: What is a Medical Coding Auditor – “Can auditors work from home? Do they have to travel a lot? Is HCC considered auditing?

Alicia: A: Actually HCC has a lot of auditing, its aspect, because you are not just looking at one encounter and then going to another patient, and another encounter and going to another patient, it’s a year’s worth of documentation for one patient at a time. So, it’s multiple encounters. It’s like looking at an inpatient’s entire chart, but it’s not just the hospital charts, the outpatient, all the consultations – everything. So, yes, there’s a lot of auditing aspects to that.

I guess, for auditing do you want to travel a lot? Because some auditors do travel and some do it from home. Our Tammy, she works from home. It really, it’s like what Tammy said, it’s really diverse, auditors, and they do get paid really well.

What is a Medical Coding Auditor | HCC Coding

Laureen: When I first started, I did E/M audits and I would do it for groups, hospitals, and I would do it in my local area, so you can make it work how you want it to work; so if I didn’t like doing onsite audits, I didn’t mind doing onsite presentations of the results but I wanted to do the audit at home at my own pace and so I would quote him a really high amount if I had to do an onsite audit. But if they got me the charts redacted and send them to me or I pick them up and I could do them at my office, then I would charge far less.

So, normally they would do that. I would do all the audit work at home, prepare my report, then I would go and I’d do the presentations. The traveling was driving maybe within a 3-hour radius or whatever I chose; so if you want to, you could expand the radius even more. Some people work for auditing companies where they fly them all over the place, onsite and do audits, so there’s a lot of different things you can do with it.

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