I’ve been pretty quiet lately around the blogosphere and some may even think I’ve disappeared. And for about a year, up until about October, I really had disappeared a bit to plan and live through my wedding. After a couple months of an identity crisis, I’ll announce here that Coder Coach Kristi Stanton has disappeared and the new Coder Coach is now Kristi Pollard. The new last name will take a couple of decades to get used to, but I am hopeful that if I’m quoted in the future, it won’t be as the first actress to play Buffy the Vampire Slayer. True story.
For the last couple of months I’ve been waiting for inspiration to strike so I could once again become passionate about the blog. I’ve been observing. Don’t get me wrong, with all the legislation and talk about more ICD-10 delays, I’ve also been writing my congressmen, participating in Twitter rallies (follow me at @codercoach), and making posts on Facebook, but I’ve spent more time just watching. Watching the industry. Watching my colleagues. Watching hopeful coding professionals trying to break their way in. And this is what I’ve deduced: if you want to make it in the coding field, you’ve got to diversify.
It didn’t take long after the ICD-10 delay was announced in March to see the fallout. Some of our clients stayed the course while others postponed some training. There have been very few canceled trainings all together for ICD-10. A couple of months ago, I dusted off a couple of our CPT training manuals that hadn’t been updated in awhile to get them ready to train in 2015. It was comforting to fall back into something that still required the skill of a senior consultant that was a sure thing. Of course, I hope for a future with ICD-10 and will continue to advocate for it, but there’s always CPT as well.
Here is my message to the coding students and aspiring coders. Coding is not steady and it’s not comfortable. Even without ICD-10, annual updates to the coding industry can rock your world (case in point all the new lower GI endoscopy CPT codes for 2015). This field has a tendency to attract detail-oriented people who like to organize everything in pretty and neat little black and white buckets. As coders, we don’t like gray areas. Well, as a coder, be ready for gray, purple, and yellow polka-dotted areas. You need to be flexible. You need to be ready when the House throws language into a bill at midnight the night before a vote that will impact your daily work. And you need a backup plan just in case.
I feel a bit like a financial adviser as I tell you you need to diversify. DI. VER. SI. FY. Don’t put all your coding eggs in one basket. As someone who has coded in ICD-9-CM, ICD-10-CM/PCS, CPT, and HCPCS, I understand what I’m asking you to do. It’s not easy. They all have different rules and methodologies. I understand that I’m asking you for a lifetime of education. But the payoff for doing the work is immeasurable. And the more you have exposure to, the more marketable you are as a coder.