Any Telephone triage nurses out there?

[lorio]

I need to chat with a LPN who is working as a telephone traige nurse. For my final activity in the pn program, I need to pick your brain and ask you a few questions such as; Why you chose this type of work? yadda yadda yadda. So if you have about five min. to complete about 4-5 questions I would be grateful. I need a "A" Thanks Lori, Soon to be LPN.

[lorio]

Thankyou, Audreyfay. My paper is in! Im sure I did fine, I had a few other people give me some feed back as well. Great input from all, This type of work reminds me of a position with Broward County Fire Rescue, "Caller Aide" A position in our Dispatch center that would instruct the caller what to do in the event of an emergency situation. ie cpr. first aid, that sort of thing. Thanks again, I hope you had a Happy Thanksgiving. Lori

[ummyasmeen]

Hi I am a Triage Nurse and an LVN (LPN) I work from home and rarely go into the office. I work for a hospice. so what questions did you have?

[indigo girl]

...a medical coding program at a local vocational school which I have since discovered is not the best route to go ...

Could you give your opinion on what is the best route, if not the local vocational school for learning medical coding?

Never mind, I see you already covered this in your post. Thank you.

[ChiaRN]

what do you think of the 5 day coder bootcamps for rns?

lorio. . .as my back was getting worse i started looking at other options that would take me off the clinical floor. one of them has been medical coding. i took a medical coding program at a local vocational school which i have since discovered is not the best route to go to learn it, but i got hired by a company that services a huge practice of er physicians because of my rn background. it was a sit down desk job and i chose to work in the building although i could have taken what they call "charts" home to code them. we would read through the er physicians dictations for each person they had treated and then place the icd-9-cm and cpt codes on them for the billers to put into the computer in the data department. that information then gets turned into a bill that is sent to the patient or his insurance company who will be paying the bill. medical coding is how all medical bills are generated. it is a growing profession as a smart, knowledgeable coder is worth their weight in gold. it is estimated that most doctors underbill or do not follow up on insurance company denials of their claims and so they lose a lot of income that way. medicare is known to be recommending that every facility doing any kind of coding have at least one certified coding on staff. california has kind of taken that to heart and a coder can't find a coding job out here without being nationally certified. starting pay, however, is $18/hr. not too bad for a desk jockey. back in ohio coders start at $12/hr.

coding led me to the community college where i have been taking a class here and there in coding and in health information management which is the career that supervises coding and billing. the jobs that are available to health information management people are very interesting, but you have to get an aa in it from a college that has an ahima (american health information management) approved course. our instructors are all health information management people who are heading up these departments in the hospitals where they work or they are security officers within their hospital computer departments. their one big responsibility is patient confidentiality of the medical record and hipaa compliance. they are always announcing job openings. one recent one was for a birth certificate registrar. him people also staff the medical staff offices, tumor registries, and the list goes on and on. a him graduate with an aa can start out at nearly the same salary as an rn. you should look into this line of work.

everything is going computerized and that is the direction things are heading. medicare is calling the shots on payment of doctor and hospital fees and the insurance companies follow what they do. they alone are probably what is most responsible for this massive growth in these healthcare careers. there is no state licensing as with nurses, but getting a national certification from ahima is pretty much expected and is purely voluntary on your part. these are primarily desk and office jobs although some of the more glamorous ones do have some travel connected with them.

[pagandeva2000, LPN]

I also thought that telephone triage was geared towards the RN because of the assessment piece involved. This is interesting to note.