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When students first enroll at Andrews, they often are overwhelmed by the massive amounts of work ahead of them to learn all that they need for a successful medical coding career. I don't need to list them all here for you. You know what they are.

At that point your head is full of all sorts of acronyms: CPC, AAPC, CCS, AHIMA, CPT, ICD-10-CM/PCS - oh yes, the PCS!!! 

It truly is much like a quilt.  You start with a stack of material, an assortment where nothing seems to have any relationship to anything else.  It's all pretty much a mess.  But you have a VISION. You KNOW how you want it to look when you're finished.  Piece by piece, stitch by stitch, your vision comes into view.

Some of our students are former or even current medical transcriptionists. They can remember back to that day when they learned 'itis', 'blepharo', 'encephalo', 'osis', 'megalo' 'ology' and lots of other strange-sounding prefixes and suffixes.  It all meant nothing until you could actually see it come together in a medical report.  At first it seemed like that would never happen. ENDLESS hours spent in learning about 'pieces' that never seemed to have a reason for you to learn them. They didn't fit together---until they did. 

Now I want to use an analogy that I learned from Karen Tiber Leland, who explains a complicated process by describing the New York skyline.  "If you have ever seen one of those giant puzzles of the New York skyline (the ones that take up an entire card table), you know that at the beginning, you're just looking for the low-hanging fruit---basically anything you can easily recognize.

*"There's the top of the Empire State Building."
*"Here's a piece of the Chrysler Building."
*"I think that's a corner of the 59th Street Bridge."

As you add more pieces, the image of the skyline begins to take shape, and finally when that last piece is in place, you step back and with satisfaction go "Ahhh, there it is. The New York skyline in all its glory."

I can appreciate that feeling of accomplishment our Medical Coding graduates may feel after they've reached some of those goals they've set for themselves, finishing a course module, mastering a concept, and finally, getting that CPC, successfully sitting for that CCS, hearing back from that employer that they want to make you a job offer.

The pieces finally come together, and it was worth it.







*Quotation from Karen Tiber Leland in her book, The Brand Mapping Strategy, 2016.