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Laureen: All right, so the next question we had is ICD-10 related as well. “Where do you get started if you want to learn ICD-10 coding?” or “where can I learn ICD10 coding?”
Well, we hope you come get started with ICD10 coding with us. We’ve got an online ICD-10 full coding course which goes through every single chapter of ICD-10, all the guidelines and a lot of detail with lots of practice. That’s really the key. As a coder you want to get your hands in the manual, go to the index, be verifying it in the tabular, and then, you know, go on from there. So, that’s a good place to start. Chandra, I don’t know if you have any suggestions…
Chandra: I think the first place that you start to learn ICD10 coding is having someone explain to you how to use the manual. As silly as that sounds, I’ve taught ICD-10 and ICD for a long time, and it was funny because the number of groups that I’ve taught that have had at least one or two people in them, there was a group that comes to mind for me.
I was teaching out in California and there was a lot of physicians in the group and a lot of practice administrators in the group, and at our first break, a couple hours into our training session that day, one of the administrators who happened to be a physician’s wife came up to me and she said, “Can I just say thank you?” and I said, “Why?” And she said, “I’ve had this book,” and it was an ICD-10 manual, and she said, “I’ve had this book on my desk for six to eight months and could not figure out what I was supposed to do with it, couldn’t figure out how use it.” She’s like, “Now I actually feel like I know how to use it, and how to look up what I’m looking up, and where the important pieces are.” And I was like, “Okay.”
So, we kind of take for granted, those of us that know how to use it. We tend to take for granted how easy it is to use or that we understand it, and we really got to start from basics with some of our students.
So instead of asking “where can I learn ICD10 coding”, perhaps a better question is “where can I learn ICD10 coding that properly explains how to use the ICD10 manual“. Naturally, our ICD10 online course covers this topic very well.
Laureen: Very good. And I really enjoy ICD-10 over ICD-9. I just find it more logical and, you know, easier to understand. Of course it’s always hard, change is hard to go from one system to another but, you know, when you take a step back and look at it for face value, it really is quite a good system. And the index in the ICD-10 is very, very well thought out.
By the way, this is one of my favorite tools in Find-A-Code. We went over it a little bit last night, but the reverse index. And, a lot of people don’t realize this is in there but if you go to the ICD-10, and you can use this digital encoder similar to a paper one instead of having just type the keywords in and trust, because, you know, ICD-10 index is more the terms that you’ll see the physician write. And when you go verify it in the tabular, like I would have never found that if I just started looking in the tabular because the words aren’t even there. It’s an index and you go back and you double check, and you go look in the tabular, “Yup, this is where it’s telling me to go.”
So, this is kind of a neat way to, you know, use the index if you wanted to look up like they’re saying, you know, try cardio. So this is the same as using your index in ICD-10 and starting to look at C-A-R-D-I-O. And it starts showing you the list and then you can expand it. If this is what you’re looking for, you could stop right there and it shows you the hierarchy. It’s really cool and then you could even put it in book view if you want to take a peek at how it lines up that way. So, I just think that’s that’s a really cool feature. Not all encoders have that. Not like this at any rate.
The “Where Can I Learn ICD10 Coding” video segment originally aired on Live with Laureen #010.