Omega Healthcare, a leading offshore provider of healthcare outsourcing services, has inked an alliance with AAPC with an aim to upgrade more than 2,000 employees as AAPC certified coders. This is over and above its existing 500 certified coders in the company.
The company will continue its sponsored certification and at no cost to the employees.
AAPC is USA’s largest medical coding training and certification association for medical coders and medical coding jobs. The 27-year old association was set up to provide education and professional certification to medical coders and to elevate the standards of medical coding by providing student training, certification with ongoing education, networking and job opportunities.
According to the Kaulkin Ginsberg Report, there is a is growing evidence that implementation of ICD-10 is the next big step that will change the healthcare sector in the United States and the outsourcing industry, creating a huge demand for certified medical coders in the US, Middle East and India. This market segment is growing at 17 per cent CAGR in the US.
“Medical coding offers huge growth potential due to healthcare reforms in the US creating the need for more processing jobs. The conversion of ICD-9 to ICD-10 coding system to be implemented this year has provided great impetus to the healthcare outsourcing industry. We are gearing up to meet the demand by training and offering AAPC certification for our coders,” said Gopi Natarajan, co-founder & chief executive officer Omega Healthcare.
“Our medical coding team is the largest in the country. Our employees can become certified coders just after the conversion to ICD-10 is planned, providing them an edge over the others in the industry. In fact, we would have over 2,500 AAPC certified coders by the end of 2016 to provide optimal service-levels to the US healthcare industry, ” he added.
According to the company, employees are given opportunities to upgrade their skills on a regular basis. They could choose from core certifications like CPC, COC, CIC, etc., along with 20 other speciality certifications. The training course is for around 100 – 150 hours of training, and includes 3 mock assessments.