If you’re thinking about doing medical billing and coding and working from home there are a few things you want to know. First of all do you have the ability or skills or training in order to be able to process claims for doctors, dentists or large clinics.

To process claims at home you’ll either have to be in business for yourself or make some arrangement with your employers to work at home. The employer in this case would be the doctor, dentist or other health professional or clinic that needs medical billing service. This may be difficult to do if you haven’t had the proper training and don’t have the right medical billing software.

Many people who do work from home doing medical billing and/or coding generally have their own business. They have started home businesses after getting the right training. (Coding requires separate training and certification may be required by some employers.)

It would probably be difficult to get on-the-job training and more than likely you’ll have to get training through online courses, programs or schools or on campus locally where you live. There is a national exam for certification as a Medical Billing Specialist that would probably be required by most companies seeking your service. Plus after you get some training you’ll want on-the-job experience so you can learn the ropes. You want to know what you’re doing before you work alone at home.

So one of the things you can do is call some of the clinics in your area and find out whether they do their medical billing and coding in-house or whether they send it out to a billing service. If they do it in-house, ask if they hire people to do additional billing for them at home either by contracting out to you or hiring you to work at home and they would act as employer. There may be a lot of variation in practices in different geographical areas. So best to call and see what you can find out.

So now you may know a little bit more about whether you want to work from home doing medical billing and coding. When you do decide that you do need some training, there is federal government money available for online courses as well as on-campus. So you want to check out medical billing training online and local colleges. Be careful of any scams that may be operating. Read the fine print and don’t sign up for any courses you don’t need.