ICD-10 Coding Manuals: AAPC vs Elsevier vs Optum360

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ICD10 Coding Manuals AAPC vs Elsevier vs Optum360Laureen:  Which of the ICD-10 Coding Manuals is better? AAPC, Elsevier, or Optum360? I’ll let Alicia talk about ICD because that’s her favorite.

Alicia:  Actually, the ICD manual is the easiest to get and has the biggest variety of choices, the ICD does not have a copyright on it. There are several vendors, my particular favorite is Elsevier which is the Carol Buck one. There are several reasons that I prefer that one. The paper quality is good; it has lots of extra notes and pictures and colors. It’s very visual, and so when I see a picture of a particular disease, it pops for me. But Elsevier is a little more expensive.

Just to note though, if you’re going to purchase an Elsevier ICD-10 manual and you have Amazon Prime, you can go to our bookstore and there’s an Amazon link. It saves you like $30. Plus you don’t have to be shipping if you buy the ICD manual there. It was a huge saving! Jesus set this all up for us when he was showing us, that you have to be an Amazon Prime member to get the best advantage, but if you go to the PBC course and you click, you scroll down, click on that Amazon, it will show you the price.

We have to charge you $106 plus shipping. That’s how much we pay for, but you can get it for $72 – $87 if you’re an Amazon Prime member, and not pay shipping. I checked the CPT manual, it doesn’t have that same value, but the ICD-10 does, the HCPCS and stuff.  

Laureen:  We’re not in the book selling business. We created the bookstore to just make it easier for the students to find what they need. Really, what they’re doing a lot was they’re coming to our bookstore and they’re grabbing the ISBN and trotting over to Amazon, so we just made it easy for you. We gave you the button. So, go ahead and do that; but if you find that the price is better with us, go ahead and click “Add to Cart” and it will go to the same vendor. Sometimes with Prime because you get it so quick; pretty soon we’re going to really see one of those planes called hovercraft, you know what I mean.

Alicia:  Yeah. Drones.

Laureen:  Drones, that’s it; Amazon drones.

Alicia:  Again, Elsevier is a good manual, but of course you’re going to pay a little bit more for it, so it’s quality. Now, the AAPC, they buy in bulk, so you can purchase their ICD-manual at a good price. I do know that a lot of students get a discount and stuff. But their print has gotten smaller, so just be warned. Again, there’s nothing wrong with the manual, but this year compared to last year, the print is significantly smaller. It used to be just the Index was smaller, but now the whole Tabular is a lot smaller. If that’s not an issue for you, then, by all means there’s nothing wrong with that manual. But be aware of that.

There are a couple other vendors, it used to be Optum but I don’t know if they still call it Optum, and that manual is Contexto or something like that.

Laureen:  Optum360. That’s a pretty good one.

Alicia:  That is too. I know that Tammy that used to be our auditing instructor, she had used that one and she always liked that one. But there are four major vendors for ICD; they’re all good, they all have their own component.

Laureen:  It’s not like you’re going to get a wrong one. If you want to know the ones we use, Alicia loves Elsevier, Chandra’s always used the AAPC because she did a lot of their ICD-10 training. We’re actually talking to a publisher about them taking some of our ideas and some of our annotations and baking them into a future version, not 2017, but maybe for 2018, a different color coding strategy, a different way to know when you’ve gone to the highest level of specificity with ICD-10. We’re excited about that. we’re not sure how it’s going to turn out, we’re just in initial talks but we are listening and we are thinking about what is best for the students, and we’re trying to communicate that on everyone’s behalf.

The “ICD-10 Coding Manuals: AAPC vs Elsevier vs Optum360” video segment was originally shown on Live with Laureen #010.

Links to ICD-10 Manuals Mentioned

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