Coding Crunch: The Future of Medical Coding

Did anyone see the interesting article in For The Record magazine entitled, Coding Crunch: Who will feed the cash cow?

It talks about how recruiters and HIM professionals at healthcare facilities are having a hard time recruiting and retaining medical coding specialists at their facilities. Some are having to use outside-of-the-box techniques to lure medical coders to their facilities. More and more coding professionals are opting to work from home instead of fighting traffic and losing out on quality family time, and medical facilities are willing to offer this perk to keep their valued coders.

Surely, this conundrum also appeals to outsourced medical coding services who can deliver qualified medical coding specialists on or off-site to these facilities as well.

Temp Nurse Staffing: Always Pay Payroll Taxes

PRN Funding’s president, Phil Cohen, has given unsolicited advice and presentations on the importance of nurse staffing companies paying their payroll taxes. Even going so far as to point out that payroll and taxes are a nurse staffing business owners two biggest obligations, and they are obligations that will NEVER go away.


Another fellow factoring blogger warns about the complications of not paying payroll taxes in the post: Payroll Taxes Must be Paid. The blogger states specifically: “Unpaid payroll taxes are a liability that goes beyond the corporation and sticks directly to the business owner personally.”

The bottom line, don’t mess around with not paying your payroll taxes because when the IRS finds out, and they will find out eventually, your temporary nurse staffing business and you, personally, will pay.

Noted presentation at 2007 Healthcare Staffing Summit

 Although there a lot of intesting presentations at this year’s Healthcare Staffing Summit, one in particular stood out to PRN Funding’s president, Philip Cohen.  He asked that we share some details of Verne C. Harnish’s presentation for our blog readers.

 

Harnish is the CEO of Gazelles Inc., which is an outsourced corporate university for midsized firms.  He’s also the founder of the Young Entrepreneurs’ Organization and the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs among many other accolades. Click here to read more about Verne C. Harnish’s bio.

 

 

His presentation revolved around four simple questions that any business owner should be asking their clients on a weekly basis:

 

How are you doing?

What’s going on in your industry/neighborhood?

What do you hear about our competitors?

How are we doing?

 

The answers to these questions will help you get to you know clients more on a personal level so that you can adapt and serve their needs in a more professional manner.  Philip Cohen thought this was a great concept to share with our business owner blog readers.

 

 

Five Trends to Watch in the Medical Staffing Industry

At this year’s Healthcare Staffing Summit, Barry Asin (EVP & Chief Analyst of Staffing Industry Analysts Inc.) shared five trends to watch in the healthcare staffing marketplace for the upcoming year.  We’ve decided to share his points with our readers:

  1. There’s a limited supply of practitioners, but there’s a modest increase in the number of nurses.  New grads, male nurses, foreign-born nurses and older workers who are interested in a career change.
  2. There’s ongoing growth and demand.  Since 1992, there has been a 50 percent increase in healthcare employment. 
  3. There’s a healthy competitive environment.  In 2006, 21 medical staffing agencies were over the $50 million mark, and 13 were over the $100 million mark, and the top ten firms owned 40 percent of the market.  There is a lot of growth in specialty industries such as radiology, pharmacy, CRNA and international recruiting, but nursing is still the largest.
  4. Regulations / government intervention is portrayed in a positive light because it helps with nurse-patient ratios, overtime restrictions, licensing, immigration reform and visa shortages.
  5. Technology trends are both good and bad.  About 12 percent of facilities have adopted a VMS and another 44 percent plan to adopt them in the future.  This is a slow train coming for the industry as a whole.  It’s only a matter of time before everyone’s using a VMS.  The internet has helped keep recruiting costs down with the rise in company web sites, job boards and the social networking.

In general Barry said that the public medical staffing company results were positive in the second quarter, and the trends are remaining very strong.  Net income and gross margins continue to grow.

Barry also mentioned that a good opportunity for medical staffing agencies is to look into non-healthcare-related positions within a hospital, which are usually filled by temporary workers. Examples of some of these positions include: janitors and cafeteria workers.

Thoughts on the 2007 Healthcare Staffing Summit

PRN Funding’s present had the opportunity to attend Staffing Industry Analyst’s 2007 Healthcare Staffing Summit in Chicago last month.  Written below are a couple of thoughts he wanted to communicate with PRN Funding’s blog readers:

 

With over 500 attendees, this was by far the largest Healthcare Staffing summit of all time.

 

The majority of attendees were involved with the per diem and travel side of nurse staffing.

 

As locum tenens and allied health staffing continues within the industry of healthcare staffing, these companies were well represented at the conference as well.  In fact, some of the presentations were geared specifically for these industries.

 

The depth and breadth of the speakers were impressive.

 

Overall, the conference was very well attended and very well-run.  It was a real learning experience for everyone.

 

We look forward to attending the 2008 show in San Francisco!

Challenges for the Medical Coding Vendor

There’s a lot of buzz these days going around about the growth of the medical coding industry, especially the concept of outsourcing what was once a predominantly in-house service. Of course with any change comes a certain amount of worries and questions.

Gone are the days when a health care facilitiy only calls on a medical coding vendor when they need to catch up on a back log. Health care facilities are now starting to use medical coding vendors to meet all of their coding demands.

As this trend continues to grow, and it will, the key for medical coding service owners is to minimize the perceived risk associated with outsourcing. The medical coding services who will succeed in the marketplace are those who understand how to stop the preception that outsourced work is less quality work. It’s a very different way of selling compared to traditional sales. We highly recommend the book Crossing the Chasm: How to Win Mainstream Markets for Technology Products by Geoffrey A. Moore as a good guideline for how to sell to physicians.

Take-aways from 2007 AHIMA Meeting

Philip Cohen (president of PRN Funding, LLC), traveled to Philadelphia, PA for the 2007 American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Meeting earlier this month, and he wanted to share some of his general observations about this year’s conference for our medical coding blog readers.

 

Overall, Phil said that he was overwhelmed by the number of medical coding software vendors exhibiting at the show.  Much like the concept of outsourcing medical transcription has grown rapidly over the past decade, outsourced medical coding is well on its way.

 

It appears as a whole that HIM Directors are more willing to outsource a portion or all of their in-house medical coding.  However, perceived risk of using an outsourced medical coding vendor continues to remain a top worry for HIM professionals within a hospital setting.  Much like in the medical staffing industry or in the medical transcription industry, it will be up to the medical coding vendors to reduce the perceived risk.

 

Outsourcing medical coding is just one way that a medical facilitiy can cut in-house costs.  Given the current health care cash flow crunch, it will most likely take a long time for medical coding vendors to get paid by these facilities.  Therefore, it might be in their best interest to look into factoring their receivables with a funder who specializes in the medical coding industry.

 

Either way, medical coding is an industry is getting ready to explode.  PRN Funding will definitely be at the 2008 AHIMA Meeting in Seattle, Washington next year, ready and willing to learn about how we can help this growing industry become even better.

 

 

Medical Coding Services and HIPAA Compliance

In the temporary medical staffing industry, the necessity or non-necessity of becoming JCAHO compliant is a hot topic, which we have written about in the past in the Recruiting and Staffing Solutions Magazine: To Certify or Not to Certify. In fact, some healthcare staffing companies use their JCAHO compliance as a selling point when it comes to differentiating themselves from other medical staffing vendors.

Along the same competitive lines, we found a medical billing and coding blog who cautions healthcare providers to choose medical coding and medical billing vendors who are HIPAA compliant.

In their blog entry entitled, Worried about HIPAA Compliance when Outsourcing, the Outsource Management Group (a medical billing, medical coding, practice management and consulting firm located in Indiana) dishes out some advice that medical coding business owners might want to pay attention to when looking for prospective customers.

AAPC Announces 14 Medical Coding Specialty Certifications

In response to the growing demand in the medical profession for coders with individualized training in particular medical specialties, the American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) is expanding its certification offering to now include 14 specialty-specific credentials. These certifications complement AAPC’s core Certified Professional Coder (CPC™), Certified Professional Coder-Hospital (CPC-H™) and Certified Professional Coder-Payer (CPC-P™) certifications.

AAPC’s 14 specialty certifications include:

  • Ambulatory Surgical Center (CPC–ASC)
  • Anesthesia (CPC-ANEST)
  • Cardiology (CPC-CARDIO)
  • Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery (CPC-CTS)
  • E/M Auditor (CPC-E/M)
  • Family Practice Medicine (CPC-FP)
  • Gastroenterology (CPC-GI)
  • General Surgery (CPC-GENSG)
  • Internal Medicine (CPC-INTMED)
  • Obstetrics/Gynecology (CPC-OBGYN)
  • Orthopedics (CPC-ORTHO)
  • Otolaryngology (CPC-ENT)
  • Pediatrics (CPC-PEDS)
  • Plastics and Reconstructive Surgery (CPC-PLRS)

AAPC’s specialty certifications are available for those individuals who already hold CPC, CPC-H, CPC-P, CCS, or CCS-P designations and wish to demonstrate superior levels of expertise in selected disciplines of medical coding.

Click here to read the entire press release: AAPC Announces 14 Medical Coding Specialty Certifications
Specialty credentials ensure higher standard of coding

AAPC Announces Results Of 2007 Salary Survey

Just announced in the BC Advantage e-newsletter, the American Academy of Professional Coders (AAPC) released information collected from their 2007 Salaray Survey. Please read below for some highlights of the survey’s findings.

Certified coders earn an average of 17 percent more than their non-certified counterparts, according to the 2007 salary survey by the American Academy of Professional Coders, the nation’s largest education and credentialing organization for medical coders.

Other highlights from the survey include:

  • Administrators and consultants brought in the most money, both averaging more than $85,000 a year.
  • Coding professionals with master’s degrees took a huge leap this year, earning more than $85,000 a year – last year’s survey showed those with master’s degrees earned an average of $55,000 annually.
  • Coders with bachelor’s degrees earned between $40,000 – $45,000; coders with some college earned $30,000 – $35,000 a year.
  • Eight percent of coders with specialty credentials earned more than $85,000 annually.
  • Location, location, location: coders in urban settings earned more than those in rural or suburban areas.

“Each year, our salary survey shows a consistent difference between certified and non-certified coder salaries,” said Sheri Poe Bernard, CPC, CPC-H, CPC-P, vice president of member relations at AAPC. “At AAPC, we are constantly working to help more coding professionals get certified and into higher paying jobs. We are also increasing the value of credentials daily, making our certified coders more competitive in the industry.”

  • This year, 5,155 certified and non-certified coders participated in the salary survey. To view the full results and a break down of average salary by title, look in this month’s issue of Coding Edge magazine or visit AAPC’s Web site.
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