[TheDarkCrucible]

I recently became a Medical Assitant through Lincoln Tech. but I feel like there is much more I need to learn and I have heard people mention insurance classes are boring (the one we had at LTI was VERY basic)
I was wondering if anyone knowns of any places that teach just souly focused on insurance or something?
If not I assume if I go for Medical Billing and Coding Specialist it will cover this?
(I have already tried searching myself, didn't come up with anything relavent so was hoping if anyone knowns if you could share some info that'd be great )

[Perna]

Medical billing/coding and "insurance" are very different things. I don't know what you want to learn?

What each insurance company covers depends on what policy the customer buys and the customer usually gets a big 50-100 page "book" sort of thing with the information about their policy. I also get a local magazine in the mail from mine every month or three, telling me stories about various illnesses, treatments, and hospitals; success stories and general health pieces (like about skin cancer/tanning/sun screen, etc.) and there's usually a few pages about anything that has changed like changes in med status so they are covered/not covered, etc.

Medical coding is literally for the medical coders in a doctor's office; they have to have special classes and lots of experience; that's very like data entry, they just have to apply a code to the sheet they send to the insurance company about whatever illness someone has. Here's a page about what a medical coder's day is like:

What Does a Medical Coder Do? - AAPC

If you work in a doctor's office, you usually either work with the patient or in the office, but not much of both. There are lots of jobs now in the doctor's office but usually only 1 or 2 coders, depending on how big the doctor's practice is. But the person making appointments and answering the phone usually doesn't have anything to do with insurance (except to make sure that a patient's insurance information are up to date and in the patient's file); and the person(s) taking the patient back to the room to be seen by the doctor and doing the preliminary stuff and making sure the right chart is in the door/office for the right patient, etc. does that all day -- remember, doctors have to see patients every 15-20 minutes all day to make enough money to pay their staff, rent, etc.; the whole staff usually takes lunch at the same time and the office closes and the doctor often has to go to different offices (but the staff is still working even when he's on vacation) or has a day visiting his patients in the hospital, etc. Coding is a full-time job now, not like before computers when everything was done by hand (think how libraries have changed, how there use to be card files and those had to be typed up, etc.). Coding is boring (would be to me :-) like doing data entry, you just fill stuff in on a computer form.

But everything is changing now that doctors and procedures are getting more and more streamlined by computers; now each of my doctor's staff members have a computer and scan stuff and when my doctor refills my prescriptions, he does it by computer and it immediately goes to my pharmacist; no more prescription pad and handwriting no one can read :-) Coding could become more automatic too, so the doctor enters information and it gets "translated" for him instead of having to be coded by a coder. Remember, too, when a patient has tests, outside the doctor's office, the test results come to the doctor and those have to be sorted and put into the individual patient's files, etc. so they are where the doctor can review them next time the patient comes in; I'm getting blood tests and my knees x-rayed (two different places) tomorrow and those results will be in my file at my doctor's when I see him Tuesday after next. Think, if the doctor has 3 patients an hour x 7-8 hours, that's 25 or so patients a day and all those files have to be pulled and then refiled and information put in them, etc. as well as all the other patients getting tests done or who call on the phone about something, having prescriptions refilled, etc.

What insurance is about; I'd look at your own plan and read all the papers on it and its website, etc. It's very dry and legal, has to make sure "everything" is covered and is very repetitive because it has to have all the words and dot all the "i"s and cross the "t"s, etc.

The Learning Channel has a show, "How Health Insurance Works": TLC "How Health Insurance Works" maybe that will help you a bit more decide what it is you want to look at more in depth?