Construction Zone
As I stated in last week's article, I am in the process of developing two online courses at the community college. I will be teaching Medical Coding & Insurance and Introduction to the Electronic Medical Record to medical assisting students. I have tons of ideas floating around in my head about how I want the classes to be structured. The problem is sifting through these ideas and narrowing it down to fit the course objectives. Where do I start? Do I start developing both courses at once? Do I tackle one course and then start the next one?
I decided to start with medical coding and insurance course. I need to start with a roadmap to get to the finish line. So, I started with developing the course outline. The course outline will include the schedule for the next sixteen weeks based on the school calendar. I need to be sure that I work around school holidays and other campus events. The second step was to decide on the textbook for the course. This was an easy task because I have been reviewing coding textbooks over the last few months. I had no idea how many coding textbooks are on the market. Everyone seems to want to get in on this. When I was in school, there were not many choices for textbooks. We used a simple three-ring orange-binder that included the basics up to advanced coding. I don't recall who the publisher or author was but the instructor did an awesome job.
In my selection of the course textbook certain criteria was used to make a selection. The author of the textbook must be credentialed as a certified coder. This is the industry standard today for hiring coding professionals. The content of the textbook must be thorough and explain the concepts in a manner that is user friendly. Coding is such a difficult task to learn and with beginners they can easily get lost by a text that is too complicated. The flip side of that are some texts that I reviewed that were a little too elementary and lacking in substance. Another important factor, are texts that use illustrations and examples to reinforce the written text. This is very important for those learners who are visual. Visual learners learn best through pictures and other illustrations to help process information. I decided to go with the coding textbook book by Carol Buck which does an excellent job with explaining how to code using CPT-4. Buck uses illustrations and practice exercises within each chapter so that students can check their progress. Another reason for choosing the text, is that the students will be working in physician offices where the focus is on CPT coding. We will spend the last few weeks with a basic overview of ICD-9-CM coding.
Now that the coding textbook has been selected, I can determine how much material from the textbook we can cover in sixteen weeks. I don't want to exclude any information but I won't have time to cover everything. I will have to make this decision based on what information they will routinely work with in the physician's office. Because CPT is arranged in distinct sections, I want the students to be informed about all of these. What do I leave out? How do I balance what they need to know with the time constraints? Tune in next week for update on the construction zone.