I’d like to welcome you to my new website! I am very excited to finally have actually done it after dreaming about it for years. In fact, I came up with the name and my tag lines almost 20 years ago as many of my friends and colleagues in Arizona know. So when we moved to Colorado Springs almost 8 years ago, my husband asked me if I was finally going to open up that school I’d been dreaming of and talking about for years. And so I did in 2008! But I’ve actually been “making sense of medical coding” for a long time.
I began teaching over 20 years ago, working with a medical business resource center in Phoenix, writing curriculum and teaching coders, billers and physicians while managing practices for cardiovascular and thoracic surgeons. I discovered that I loved researching and writing, and then sharing what I’d learned with my students. It’s the teacher who really learns the most. And as I educated and encouraged my students, I found much satisfaction. It is always so rewarding to invest in others and then to see them succeed. It has become one of my passions.
And I have another passion – to help providers succeed in their practices. I fully appreciate that most providers just want to take care of their patients. Unfortunately, they have to deal with regulatory burdens, risk management issues and now, in many cases, they are expected to be the coder as well. Most providers that I talk with don’t want to be coders; they want to be doctors. They want to do what they were trained to do, what they love to do. I want to offer my services to relieve some of the administrative burden, to help identify inefficiencies in process and deficiencies in the coding and teach to those to improve the bottom line, to impact “the dollars and sense of medicine.”
I encourage you to take a look at the other blog posts on my site. One is called “Oh the Places You’ll Go.” There you will read personal stories from some of my colleagues in various aspects of medical coding. The intent of this blog series is to encourage those in the field who are looking for more, to help them believe more is possible. The other blog series is called “Real Life Coding” where you will find some amazing stories of real life events that have happened to those that I know and of course, we will code them. I think you will find them entertaining and informative.
I hope that you will visit often and read our blog posts, that you’ll find value here and that you will tell others about it. I believe that the sky is the limit, that if you work hard and smart, you can achieve your dreams. And so we embark on this expanded endeavor to make a difference, to “make sense of medical coding.”
Linda R. Farrington, CPC, CPMA, CPC-I
AHIMA-Approved ICD-10-CM Trainer
Owner/Instructor/Consultant
Medisense – “Making Sense of Medical Coding”
