3 Mobile Businesses in the Field of Healthcare For 2019 and Beyond!

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woman getting shot at mobile flu clinic

The mobile medical business has become more popular in the last few years due to increased ease of getting medical equipment and internet connectivity. Healthcare workers have become more reliant on internet technologies including the electronic administration medication record, or eMAR, for patient treatment and documentation. Mobile apps have added to the physician’s list of tools available to them to diagnose and treat many different diseases.

Medical Transcription

Another mobile business that you might want to consider is medical transcription. Becoming a mobile or remote transcriptionist allows the physician to record their notes verbally and have their nurse or transcriptionist type out the dialog, making full and complete sentences out of a few words. Beginning a career in medical transcription requires learning anatomy and physiology, medical terminology (including words that soundalike but are spelled differently), resources such as a medical dictionary and drug book to look up drug names, and hands-on practice transcribing a variety of medical reports. As you practice transcribing different medical reports, you also learn how to listen and understand physicians with different accents so that you can transcribe the dictation more accurately.

Medical Coding

Medical coding involves reviewing a patient’s medical record and assigning codes to diagnoses and procedures, and in some instances, durable medical equipment. Like medical transcriptionists, medical coders must have a good understanding of medical terminology and anatomy and physiology. Coders must be extremely detail oriented, and must stay up to speed on the different guidelines for coding in the inpatient and outpatient setting. Without proper coding, physicians and hospitals may not be reimbursed correctly for their services. As a mobile or remote medical coder, you can choose to work from home for one or more staffing services for hospitals in different locations throughout the country. You can also choose to travel to different hospitals or doctor’s offices in different locations, working onsite, while being employed for the same staffing firm in your home location.

Mobile Clinics

Mobile clinics are clinics that come to patients in poor communities, who are too busy to visit the clinic, or who are incapacitated and unable to leave their homes due a medical condition. More and more healthcare workers are required by their companies to get the yearly flu shots to help prevent sick time and spread of the flu within the clinic. Mobile units hire certified nurses to work part-time during flu season to administer these shots to employees. Some mobile units could be used for settings where a large number of individuals are at risk, community events, and nursing homes, to allow more at-risk patients to be vaccinated at once.

These are only a few of the mobile opportunities in the area of healthcare. In addition to exploring opportunities in mobile clinic, you might also decide to start your own mobile clinic. Review this article to learn more about how to start a mobile clinic.

You can also do a search online to locate jobs that involve reviewing or deciphering medical documentation. Online nurses can use video calls to assess different medical situations. To learn more about the different healthcare careers that you can pursue, especially if you’re interested in working from home, consider enrolling in the course entitled, “How to Make Money in Healthcare Working from Home (Full Time!)” offered by Avidity Medical Design Academy.

To learn about medical terminology, consider enrolling in our medical terminology course also.

Visit the Avidity Medical Design Academy homepage to learn more about many different subjects related to healthcare that you can use in everyday living.

5 Ways Medical Terminology is Used By Coding Professionals

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man coding on desktop computer

If you are a medical coder, medical terminology plays an integral role in every code you enter. It is the language of medicine that all medical professionals must learn, and for a medical coder, it is vital to know. Avidity Medical Design Academy offers a course in medical terminology to help you grow in your medical coding career. In the meantime, here are five ways that medical terminology will make your job easier if you are thinking about pursuing a career in medical coding, or if you are already a medical coder, and you want to continue to learn new medical terms related to a particular medical specialty, to improve the accuracy of your coding.

Reading the Medical Record Will Become More Natural

If you’re new the medical field, terms like “hepatomegaly,” “myalgia,” and “stenosis” will probably leave you scratching your head. As a medical coder, these terms should become more familiar to you, especially if you work in a doctor’s office, clinic, hospital, or ambulatory surgery center. If you code for a particular medical specialty, such as dermatology (the study of the skin) for example, you will see certain terms over and over again that pertain to dermatology, and it will become easier for you to recognize them. But other words you will not see very often and you might have to look them up. By learning medical terminology, you spend less time looking up words and more time entering codes.

Medical Terminology Helps You Find the Right Codes

Accurate coding is critical. An incorrect code becomes a permanent part of the patient’s record, it can affect patient care, and delay physician reimbursement because the patient’s claim may be rejected due to an incorrect code. It also means that you or someone else will have to go back in and correct the mistake. Coding can be challenging, especially for someone new to the field. Knowing medical terminology goes a long way towards cutting through the confusion. 

You’ll Be Able to Speak Intelligently to Other Medical Professionals

You are probably going to have to question or query doctors, nurses, lab technicians, and many other healthcare professionals in relation to a code assignment. They are most likely going to be pushed for time, so they may not have time to give you detailed answers to your coding questions. If you are familiar with the medical terminology they are using, you will be able to know exactly what they are saying and will be able to ask intelligent questions. It also helps when you get an email from your supervisor, or the medical biller, or the medical claims examiner, asking why you assigned a particular code. 

Learning Anatomy Will Be Easier

Knowing anatomy is crucial to being a successful medical coder, and in order to understand the terms used to describe the human anatomy, you must understand prefixes, root words, and suffixes, and how they combine to form the complete medical term. There is a reason why many medical terminology classes and anatomy classes are taught together.  If you know that ‘my’ means muscle and ‘-algia’ means pain, then you understand that myalgia means muscle pain. 

You’ll Be More Efficient

No one likes to think that they are not efficient at doing their job. It’s also hard when you get negative feedback. By learning medical terminology, you will be faster and more efficient at your job. The more medical terms you know, the more time you can spend finding and entering codes rather than researching unfamiliar medical terms. Your employers will be impressed, and you’ll have greater confidence in what you can bring to the table as a medical coder.

Learning medical terminology can be intimidating, as there are many terms to master, but it is a part of the job that you will do everyday. It will save you headaches, and improve your ability to accurately code each patient’s medical record. Check out “How to Learn Basic Medical Terminology (in 5 EASY Steps!) and USE IT in EVERYDAY Living!” offered Avidity Medical Design Academy, for more information on how to learn medical terminology.

To learn more about medical coding, enroll in the three-part medical coding series. Medical Coding Series (Part I) teaches you how to code using ICD-10-CM. Medical Coding Series (Part II) teaches you how to code using ICD-10-PCS. Medical Coding Series (Part III) teaches you how to code using CPT. Medical Coding III will be available in the near future.

Listen to three sample lectures from Medical Coding I. Click here to take the Medical Coding I course for only $99.99!

Title Slide for “Medical Coding Series (Part I): How to Code Using ICD-10-CM”
Lecture 1 for “Medical Coding Series (Part I): How to Code Using ICD-10-CM”
Lecture 2 for “Medical Coding Series (Part I): How to Code Using ICD-10-CM”


ICD-10 and What the Ebola Virus Means for Healthcare Reimbursement

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Public health officials are learning more every day about the procedures required to care for Ebola patients. But one thing that the Ebola crisis has revealed is that the health care system lacks the classification codes to track the disease and ultimately, to reimburse for care of patients who have the disease.

what the ebola virus means for healthcare reimbursementICD-9 has no specific code for Ebola. Under the classification system, the hemorrhagic fever would currently fall under 078.89 – the code for “other specified diseases due to viruses.” That means Ebola shares a code with many other viruses that have not yet been assigned a specific code. The next iteration of the classification system, ICD-10, gives Ebola the code A98.4. But the U.S. Congress in the spring delayed implementation of the new classification system. The fact that the United States still uses ICD-9 will make it more more difficult to share information about the disease and its movement with other countries, HIT Consultant reported. All of the world’s industrialized nations use ICD-10 and use the codes in the newer system to report health information to the World Health Organization.

Besides disease tracking, health officials are starting to learn what the Ebola virus means for healthcare reimbursement. The classification codes are also important for reimbursing the cost of care. When health claims are submitted to payers, the claim must include a code to indicate a particular disease or procedure. If any more Ebola cases arise in the United States, ICD-9 allows no way for a health care provider to submit a claim specifically for Ebola. Thomas Eric Duncan, the Liberian man who was treated at Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, had health care costs estimated at $1,000 an hour, Bloomberg News reported. That cost takes into account not only the care provided to Duncan, but also the expense of isolation procedures for an Ebola patient. The Texas hospital is not expected to recover any of the costs associated with the care of Duncan, who was uninsured.

The Texas hospital has offered to pay the health care costs of Nina Pham, one of the nurses who treated Duncan and was later diagnosed with Ebola, while she was in the hospital’s care. Pham was recently declared Ebola free after being treated at the the National Institutes of Health; that bill will likely be picked up by the federal government.

ICD-10 offers a way to submit health care claims for Ebola and also file for reimbursement for treating patients with the disease. But its implementation did not come in time for Ebola’s arrival in the United States. Much is still being learned about the procedures hospitals need to use to care for Ebola patients and it’s unclear whether new codes will be needed. But what is now clear is that the health system has a classification code for Ebola but for now, it has no way to use it. To learn more, contact us.