CPC Exam Prep — Tabbing Your Manuals

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CPC exam prep: Tabbing your manuals. Jody wants to know what is the best way to tab your coding books and do footnotes help? Alicia did this slide and I agree with everything. The less tabs, the better.

CPC Exam Prep — Tabbing Your Manuals

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Some tabs are good but don’t overtab. You have Appendix A which is a good one where the modifiers live in CPT. The index where that starts is good, maybe the Anesthesia section. Those types of things.

Now, I like to keep the sides free because you know, you want to be able to flip through it really quick and the tabs will kind of get in your way. For ICD 9, we recommend tabbing the 3 main sections in the index, Index of Diseases, the Injury and Poisoning, or the Table of Drugs and Chemicals and then the Index to E Codes.

In the tabular, we like to tab the V codes on top and the E codes. And then my personal favorite is Appendix E.

I threw this last bullet in here because I personally do not like using the E code index. Appendix E is a collapsed view of all of the 17 chapters and the V and E codes and I like using that for looking up E codes which is kind of convenient since it’s Appendix E.

So you might want to check that out because since it’s a classification system, it has to fit in the right category. So if you get to the right category and then turn there in the tabular, it’s a lot easier than trying to remember that the index says “paddle cyclist” instead of “bicycle”. So I don’t paddle cyclist. I say bicycle. And so looking in the index drives me crazy. So that’s just my personal one there.

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Laureen Jandroep

CPC, COC, CPPM, CPC-I.,Sr. Instructor for CCO.us. Laureen has over 25 years in the healthcare field. She graduated as an Occupational Therapist in 1986 and before long was running a successful therapy practice which did over 1.6 million in billing per year with a less than .06% rejection rate. Once Medicare changed how rehab companies were reimbursed this business was closed and Laureen eventually started a new company dedicated to teaching Medical Billing and Coding. Laureen has taught medical billing and coding since 1999 and currently does so through her comapny Certification Coaching Organization, LLC which does business as CCO.She resides in Florida with her husband of over 20 years Anthony and four children. They are active parents and spend most of their time these days just being parents which they love.

4 thoughts on “CPC Exam Prep — Tabbing Your Manuals”

  1. Hi, Laureen, I am in a Coding program now and I am really struggling with the Guidelines. Can you help me with what I should highlight.

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  3. For the PCS book there are not many if anything I would tab. Mine is the Elseiver manual and is color coded. However the ICD-10 I would use a tab for the guidelines beginning, neoplasm table, and modifier explanation. We have been working on notes to be taken in the ICD-10-CM manual which will offer more in-depth ideas. Right now those are the ones that come to mind for me.

    Reply

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