Podiatry Coding & Billing Alert

Figuring out how many coders your podiatry practice needs is an important and tricky aspect of managing a medical office. Every coder’s experience level is unique, and deciding how to pace your hiring to your coding demands can depend on several factors.

Read on to learn ways to streamline your staffing needs.

Consider Job Components

Obviously, a coder needs to look at patients’ health records and translate aspects of their encounters into the respective diagnosis and/or procedure codes. But what does the coder have to do or use to get that information? For example, are all your practice’s records accessible within a single computer system or otherwise integrated for easy access?

“Do the coders have to search for the op note in one system, the pathology in another, then enter the charges into a third? Expect that to take longer than one fully integrated system,” says Christine Speroni, CPC, CEMC, manager of revenue cycle at NHPP Gynecologic Oncology in Ronkonkoma, New York.

If providers are entering some coding information, coders can probably code an encounter more quickly than if they’re starting from scratch, transferring the provider’s notes for the appropriate CPT^® and ICD-10 codes.

Coding incorporates a lot of information — and many codes, including diagnosis codes, are updated annually. For coders to stay at the top of their game, they need the time and bandwidth to continue their education. But you may also want coders to take on other responsibilities, like educating providers or handling some billing obligations. Those coding-adjacent obligations affect productivity in terms of case volume, Speroni says.

Even though that time spent navigating computer systems isn’t exactly coding, it can take a lot of time and affects each coder’s productivity.

The way you structure your coder assignments also affects their productivity. If you pair each coder with a particular provider, the volume of patients a provider sees in a day may mean vastly different caseloads for coders.

If one provider sees 20 patients in a day and another sees more than 35, it might make more sense to assign coders according to the volume, for example, rather than the provider.

Define Expectations

Generally, full-time work is considered to be 40 hours a week, but some employers define full-time work differently or have times of the year where employees work fewer hours, like “Summer Fridays.” In these situations, you need to adjust your productivity expectations accordingly.

Balancing employee perks like “Summer Fridays” versus timely coding practices may mean adjusting your hiring, if your practice can swing the budget to make up those hours with additional personnel.

Performing productivity reports or an audit with a larger scope can provide the data you need to dial in on exactly what is working — or not working — with your provider and support personnel ratios.