Reference > Insurance Handbook for the Medical Office

Anonymous April 15, 2010 at 11:42 pm

I felt a little bogged down by all the information contained inthis book. It seemed too detailed and included a lot of stuff thatdidn’t really apply to just medical insurance (for example thecomplete hypocratic oath which doctors take)! Overall, it was a pretty good book. It would have been a great book if they had cut out about a third or even half of the information. I thought Guide to Medical Billing, by a company called ICDC was much better. A lot of the pertinent data without too much extra. I also liked a book called The Medical Billing Handbook by Jason Cummings.

Anonymous April 15, 2010 at 11:53 pm

This is an appropriate text for the medical biller. Although written for the office-based biller, home-based billers will find most (but not all) the information of practical benefit. Used in our homestudy course as a standard text.

KS April 16, 2010 at 12:44 am

Having had to wait many weeks for the new, revised 7th Edition I was very pleased to note the improvements made from the 6th Edition. The color examples, universal legend symbols and easy paragraph read for the student are excellent. Another long awaited addition is the expanded Medi-Cal section (applicable to California only). Having been in the industry for 25 year I can say that this is the best Billing book on the market that I have been able to find. The only down side to this book is that it is not written for the “new” biller, but more for an intermediate to experienced biller. As long as the instructor can “dumb down” some of the excellent explanations, students will learn a tremendous amount from this book. I use it in my classroom along with my own material and the students are leaving the class with a well rounded knowledge base. Over all, I am pleased with the new Edition and it’s contents.

Medical Instructor April 16, 2010 at 3:34 am

I was very disappointed in the 9th revision. Although the HIPAA compliance and e-commerce sections have been updated, the material in the workbook is exactly the same. That includes all the same editing errors from the last edition. I spend hours of my time “re-writing” these editions when they should be correct at publication. The same ICD-9 and CPT errors are still there. I am seriously thinking of changing books for my school.

twinkie April 16, 2010 at 5:11 am

This book and the accompanying workbook were the textbooks for a medical billing and insurance class. As a student with little prior exposure, I found them to be badly organized and badly written. The author jumps between topics, assumes inconsistent knowledge (sometimes leaving things unexplained and other times almost insulting the reader’s intelligence), and confuses things with extraneous information. Information that would be better presented in an appendix often clutters the text, as if the author couldn’t separate the necessary basics from the exceptions. Figures and charts are separated from the text that accompanies them, requiring much flipping of pages. Many of the workbook questions are ambiguous, lacking sufficient information to derive an answer. The prose is convoluted and reads more like a stream of consciousness than a concise teaching instrument. You will also need access to the relevant coding books, as there are few pages from which to practice abstracting and finding correct codes. This is actually understandable, since there are so many coding books and they contain so much information; however, the author could have chosen a specific group of related conditions and their range of treatments, and printed the relevant sections in an appendix for practice. Until issues like these are fixed, I recommend finding a different text.