Sunday, May 1, 2016

Penn Foster Medical Coding course review

The course takes a year and has filler in it that has nothing to do with medical coding.  This is not a certified school; now I know why.  The book for the course is written poorly and some of the course material is chunks of different courses slapped together without being updated too often.  The book does not accentuate the important parts well enough nor does it  provide enough detail in some parts.  There are several teachers for each part of the course so you don;t know who to deal with and there are "graders" that have no knowledge the course at all.  There is minimal interaction with teachers, you are on your own.  They do not want to hear suggestions and they are very defensive.   I found much more that I needed to know on the Internet.

I had a nice review of Microsoft Office, writing skills, and learned medical coding at the very end.  The course description states that you learn billing also, but this is not true.  Very little is mentioned about medical billing.  I learned ICD 9 and 10 coding, CPT, HCPCS coding, and had a short review of anatomy and pharmacology.  I am glad I had extensive knowledge of anatomy, pharmacology, and medical terminology before I took this course.  I would recommend taking these somewhere else before taking this course, because they are not extensively covered.

 I would recommend taking anatomy, pharmacology and medical terminology somewhere before taking this course, because they are not extensively covered.  You will need to take a separate course for medical billing because this is not really covered like the course description states.  AAPC offers the billing course and AHIMA offers the other courses.  I would also suggest solid Internet searching skills and the ability to work on your own.