What will you do without a superbill? What will you do?

Some coders I know are a little scared of the changes that electronic medical
records are bound to bring to their jobs. But there’s no reason to be scared,
because EMR also brings new opportunities to advance your coding career — if you
know the ropes.

When I learned that the American Academy of Professional Coders was hosting a
workshop in my area called ‘EMRs: What You Need To Know Now,’ I hightailed it on
over there. During the session, I learned how to shop for and select an EMR
system, how to work with IT-types to make it work for my practice, and I got a
glimpse of how EMR will change our medical coding jobs.

Right now, many coders focus on “rescue and recovery,” explained instructor
Shery Smith, CPC, CPC-H, CPC-I, CEMC, CCS, CCS-P, who’s also on the coding staff
of a large teaching institution that is using EMR already. “Rescue and recovery
coding” or “back end coding” involves tracking denials, finding the coding
problems that sparked them in the first place, and appealing the claim.

But with EMR implementation, more coders will become “front end coders.” That
is, they will apply their coding and regulatory knowledge at the front end to
make sure the EMR system is tailored correctly for their practice or department.
If you excel at educating clinicians on coding techniques, you’ll be in high
demand when you organization implements EMR, Smith says.

EMR will put a lot more of the coding in physicians’ hands, once your coding
staff has worked with your IT staff to tailor the system and incorporate the
correct prompts. “The new focus for coders will be coding educator and auditor,”
says Smith. And coders that are knowledgeable enough and comfortable enough to
audit and educate physicians are a “rare breed” in some places.

Meet the ‘Extroverted Librarian’ Coder: Savvy researchers who are good with
data, but can also communicate well with clinicians, IT types and other team
members will be in high demand, predicts Kaiser Permanente, Colorado’s James M.
Taylor, MD, CPC, who wrote the curriculum for the AAPC’s workshop.

In this kind of role, you might do a ten-record snapshot audit for each provider
every month and meet with them for individual education sessions. Or, you might
be available for their questions or what Smith calls “ad hoc education
sessions.” You’d have to be committed to staying abreast of updates that affect
your providers, and may be called upon to do “coding spotlights” at clinician
meetings.

Not the extroverted type? Don’t worry, says Smith. There are some back-end
coding issues that are best left to coders so as not to distract physicians from
patient care. For example, most organizations will probably have coders keep up
with changing carrier rules and haggle with carriers when denials do come up. If
you’re the type of coder who likes to sit in the back office and “just code,”
there will probably be a role for you — even in the brave new era of EMR.

Available on CD: From Paper to Digital — What Coders Need to Know Now.

Steer clear of PowerPoint poison with these tips.

For many, the invention of PowerPoint was a gift from the presenter gods. But watch out, because if you don’t use PowerPoint properly, you could be setting yourself up for a presentation disaster, says Doug Carter in his article, “How PowerPoint Presentations Can Poison Your Message And Three Simple Solutions.”

When you’re teaching medical coding to physicians and other clinicians, there’s a lot of information to get across. And certainly, PowerPoint slides can help learners absorb what you’re teaching them during the presentation. And, sending them slides after the presentation provides them with a handy reference tool. But PowerPoint’s capacity to get your point across depends on how you use it.

Make these three rules the mantra of your PowerPoint presentations, and you’ll be able to teach coding to clinicians effectively:

Rule #1 — You should be the center of attention, not the PowerPoint slides, says Carter. Your audience will respond to your message when they connect with you, rather than staring at slides and reading information.

This especially important for medical coding presentations, where the information can seem like a lot of impersonal details and ‘red tape.’ If clinicians personally trust you as someone who’s working to get the practice the reimbursement they deserve, they’ll be more likely to cooperate. Do this …

Make yourself the focal point by dressing professionally and looking your very best. Engage your audience by encouraging them to participate and asking audience members some questions.

Another trick is to write down your answers to an audience member’s question on the white board or clipboard in the front of the room, says Carter. This makes the audience feel like their ideas are important, and encourages the clinician-coder interaction that leads to better documentation habits. Once they understand they can contribute to your efforts to secure reimbursement for what they do, they’ll end up paying more attention.

Rule #2 — Make sure your visuals convey your message better than you can, says Carter. Often, visuals can be more powerful at showing relationships and explaining the “big picture” of your ideas that you can’t tell your audience in words.

Rule #3 — Your audience should understand your visual within 10 seconds or less, says Carter. If you can’t understand the visual within 10 seconds, drop it from the slide. If it’s too complicated, you will confuse your audience and lose their attention, as they will stop listening to you and try to decipher your visual instead.

What that means for coder presenters: Break up information into small, digestible chunks or simple flow charts or checklists.

© Adapted from Successful Supervisor.

Medical coders who are seasoned presenters know they won’t convince clinicians to improve their documentation unless they give the docs hard data. So let’s learn how to get that hard data into your PowePoint slides quickly and easily.

Adding a chart to your PowerPoint presentation sounds like a simple matter, but you’re probably wasting valuable time with this step. For instance, if you have your data already in an Excel workbook, do you still manually add the data to your PowerPoint chart? Check out these 3 ways to add charts to your PowerPoint presentation and find the best process for your needs.

To add a chart to our presentation in the most efficient way possible, we’ll:

• Build a brand new slide that includes a chart using the slide’s content layout.
• Add a chart to an existing slide in seconds.
• Create a chart from an Excel workbook that updates when we edit the Excel data.

Figure A

Once you know the points that you want to make in your PowerPoint presentation and the data that supports those points, you need to decide how to insert the data. We’ll show you how to add a chart to your slide — even if you want to use data you already have in an Excel workbook.

Use a content layout

The easiest way to start is to use a content layout that includes a chart icon. To do so, right-click on the slide and choose Slide Layout (Layout in PowerPoint 2007). Choose any layout that has the word Content in its name. For example, the Title and Content layout looks like Figure A.

To create a chart using a content layout:

1. Click the Insert Chart icon. The default chart (a 3-D column chart) appears with a datasheet containing dummy data.

2. Replace the dummy data with the data you need.

Manually enter data into this datasheet to replace the existing data if you don’t have it elsewhere in electronic format

If you have data in Excel, open the Excel file, select the data you need (including the column and row titles), and copy it to the Clipboard. On your slide, click in the datasheet’s upper-left cell and paste.

3. Right-click in any blank area inside the chart, and choose Chart Type to open the Chart Type dialog box.

4. Choose a chart type, and click OK.

Insert a chart on any slide

If the slide’s layout doesn’t contain a chart icon, you can still insert a chart. From the menu bar, choose Insert | Chart to display the default datasheet. Then continue with Steps 2 to 4 from the “To create a chart using a content layout” section. (In PowerPoint 2007, choose Chart in the Insert tab’s Illustrations group and continue with the rest of the instructions for 2007.)

Insert an Excel object that updates with your data

Sometimes, you may already have a chart in Excel. You can select that chart in Excel and then copy and paste it onto your slide. This procedure inserts an Excel object, which means that PowerPoint retains the connection to the Excel file. If you need to edit the chart, you can double-click on the chart and the Excel file opens within PowerPoint.

What do you do if your data changes often? Price listings and financial data may change from day to day, but you need to make sure that the data on your slide is up to date. The answer is to create a link between the two files.r />

To insert an Excel object with a link:

1. We recommend that you place the Excel chart on a separate Chart tab. If necessary, you can right-click on a tab, choose Insert, select Chart, and click OK. Then create the chart on that tab, or copy and paste it there.

2. Choose Insert | Object from the menu bar. (In PowerPoint 2007, click the Insert tab, and choose Object in the Text group.) The Insert Object dialog box opens.

3. Choose the Create From File option on the Insert Object dialog box’s left side.

Figure B

4. Click the Browse button and navigate to the Excel file. Click it and click OK. At this point, you are back in the Insert Object dialog box, as shown in Figure B.

5. To maintain a data connection with the Excel file, select the Link check box.

6. Click OK to place the data on the active slide.

7. Your slide might not display the section of the worksheet that you want, or might display data rather than the chart in Excel. Double-click on the chart to open Excel, display the Chart tab containing your chart, save, and close. Your chart should now appear on your slide, as shown in Figure C.

Figure C

Extensive editing of an Excel spreadsheet may prove awkward from a slide in PowerPoint. For this reason, we recommend finalizing the data in Excel as much as possible before you bring it into PowerPoint.

Update your Excel links manually

The reason you link to an Excel file is to ensure that your chart always matches the data in your Excel file. If you make a change in the Excel file, the PowerPoint file updates automatically. Sometimes, however, you need to update the slide manually. To update a link, select the linked object, right-click on it, and choose Update Link.

Once you insert your chart, you’ll want to make it more visually appealing than the default settings. For a few quick chart-formatting tips, stay tuned for an article titled “Double your chart’s curb appeal with a few quick formatting pointers,” coming soon in My Coding Career.

©Inside Microsoft PowerPoint. Download your free sample issue here.

Learn these tricks. Slash A/R.

Fess up. We know you’re dreading it — that medical coding presentation that’s supposed to help physicians, NPPs and PAs in your practice improve their documentation — and, in turn, help you do better in your job.

While you might feel like grabbing a megaphone like this guy on the right, there are smarter ways to grab their attention and make sure they take your lessons to heart.

Today, let’s talk about your opener — the first couple of minutes of your talk that sets the stage for all that follows. Experts say that an audience sizes you up and makes a decision about what you have to say in the first 30 seconds of your talk. To pull off a great opener, try these strategies:

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1. Think about the presentation’s end goal first. Before you start writing your presentation, step back and think about the documentation problems you’re trying to solve. To brainstorm, ask yourself:

• What documentation problems are causing the most queries, denials or compliance risks? Tip: You probably can’t tackle them all in a single presentation, so limit your scope to a manageable number.
• Group the documentation problems you want to end into ‘themes’ or ‘patterns.’ If you group similar points together, your doctors will understand the takeaways.
• Imagine a ‘perfect world.’ If your presentation is successful, what will your physicians understand and do?

2. Brainstorm a WIFM for your opener. Simply put, audiences want to know WIFM: “What’s In It For Me?” So, within the first 30-60 seconds, you need to convince your audience that they’ll get something out of your talk. Remember to base your presentation around your audience, not around yourself.

Lucky for you, the WIFM for coding presentations is pretty easy. Example: Calculate the money lost on each level-4 E/M claim you must submit as a level-3 because of improper documentation, and from that, calculate the cash the practice loses each year.

3. Know what not to include in your opener. If speaking in front of groups is new for you, it’s easy to botch the beginning by fumbling around for the first minute before you make your first point. Here are some examples of actions or statements that don’t help the audience pay full attention:

• “I know you’re busy and I appreciate you taking time out of your day to come.” Don’t remind your audience of other tasks they have to accomplish.
• Apologizing, whether it’s not having time to prepare, the fact that the audience can’t read the slide, or anything else. Instead, take the time to make the presentation as good as possible and don’t apologize.
• Drinking water, adjusting your clothing, looking at your watch, or glancing through your notes. These actions are distracting and don’t put your attention on the audience. The audience wants your full attention!

4. Start with an attention step. Within the first 30 seconds, you should get to your attention step, which is something you say to wake up the audience and get their attention. Some ideas:

• Ask your audience a question and ask them to raise hands in reply. For example, “How many of you want to get paid fairly for all MDM you do?”
• Start with a short, relevant story or experience. For example, try a humorous example of what a coder sees and thinks when she’s trying to squeeze reimbursement from a slapdash note.

The attention step should be very short. Obviously, if it goes on for too long, the audience stops paying attention!

5. Summarize the basics. The final step, and the meat of the opener, is to answer the following 2 questions:

• What is your topic? Give a brief explanation of your topic, just a little longer than the title of your talk. Don’t give away the secret of your talk, but whet their appetite.
• Why is your topic important? This is where your WIFM comes in. Tell the clinicians why the topic is important to them. What will they have gained by the end of the talk? Don’t feel shy to promise that they’ll learn something useful; they really want to know that.

The entire opening should only take a minute or two. More than two minutes, and it becomes boring because the audience is impatient to hear the main content of your presentation.

6. Practice and rewrite. Because the audience gets an impression of you so quickly, you need to rehearse your opener so that you can deliver it clearly and confidently. Most public speakers don’t memorize their entire speech word for word, because the result seems stilted. But they do memorize their opener and conclusion.

So practice until you can give your opener smoothly. A stumbling opener reduces the attentiveness of the audience and you’ll spend the next 10 minutes trying to get it back.

Time your opener and make sure it doesn’t take too long. One to two minutes is a good length. You’d be surprised how much you can say in two minutes!

Adapted from Inside Microsoft Powerpoint. Download a free sample issue here.