Second class citizen Apprentice
No not you! I have 15 years operating room,gi,and labor delivery experience. I have been a or surgery scheduler,biller/auditor for over three years and too have applied for every coding job i get emailed,texted or whatever. I have been certified over a year and I am very discouraged and disappointed.
I am a new coder, and after many months of applying and being rejected to every possible position under the sun, I have to say that I too am quite disillusioned and discouraged as far as trying to break into the coding field goes, even with my 14 years of acute care background as a transcriptionist behind me. I have found that the moment a prospective employer discovers that I am "only an apprentice", the door gets shut immediately. The following is an excerpt from the latest email I received after I took their assessment test, and must have done well with it to warrant a second email with the next question of "
Are you fully CPC Certified, or is your status still CPC-A?". I answered honestly that I was still considered an "A", despite my extensive background, but that in my opinion I was fully certified, and this was the answer I received "
I would be happy to bring you on board, however it is not up to me. It is up to the client we have a contract with. I have forwarded your message to the client hiring manager in an attempt to present you for consideration despite the fact that our contract with them clearly states not to submit an apprentice for consideration." Unfortunately, this is an all too typical response so I think that it is understandable that my enthusiasm has waned considerably. I really feel that there is little or no support for new coders from AAPC (at least in my humble opinion), and in fact by imposing this mandatory apprentice status they have done just the opposite and made it even tougher if not impossible for new coders to break into the field. I wonder what will happen when the older coders all retire, and there is no one there to fill those places. I remember standing in line for the luncheon buffet at the annual chapter seminar, and a biller-turned-coder told me that her required two years of experience that was needed to remove the apprentice status had been expunged in lieu of her billing experience, and she had not taken any formal training/education. While a biller may be more familiar with the insurance nuances, does that make them any more capable of abstracting diagnoses and procedures from a patient report than an experienced transcriptionist? Do they know what surgical instruments would be consistent with which surgical procedure? – a transcriptionist would. Would they know the difference between dysphagia and dysphasia? Would they know that a procedure should not be included in a physical examination, but could be billed if separated and titled as a procedure even within the same report? These things are just as important as the insurance side of the picture, and therefore should hold just as much weight if AAPC is going to waive the apprentice status for some. I find this very unequal and very unfair. I feel very strongly that it would be better to do away with the apprentice label altogether. The employers already state the number of years that they require for their company when hiring, so new coders would either qualify or not qualify, but if they took a chance and applied for the job, at least they would be looked at by their merit and achievements, and not disregarded because of an apprentice status. After all, we took the formal training along with the debt of student loans, and then we took and passed the intensive exam to the standards that AAPC themselves set. That in itself should make us fully certified. Take this example, if a new driver takes a driver's education course, and passes their driving exam, that would make them fully certified to drive. A 20-year-old may not have the years of experience behind the wheel of a car that 50-year-old might have, but he/she is still just as qualified to drive. If a person is an intern or extern prior to taking their exam, yes, that would make them an apprentice. But when one has passed the "certification" exam, then that by AAPC's own standards would make them fully certified in my opinion.