subject: Improve your medical coding vocabulary: Here’s how [print this page] Author: Nancy Rose Author: Nancy Rose
As a coder, you learn new codes every day and pep up medical billing and coding career information. This is notwithstanding the case that you may have taken a few college courses and aced the medical terminology portion of your CPC exam.
Reading these 8 steps by Ellie Smith, RN, MSN, education coordinator at Arroyo Grande Community Hospital and instructor at Cuesta College in San Luis Opispo, Calif. will certainly improve your medical terminology know-how.
First, learn the common word roots for each body system as these are the building blocks for medical terminology. Eg. cardi/o referring to heart, pulmon/o referring to lungs, etc. These are not full words and hence they are written with the /o at the end.
The next thing that you need to do is to learn common prefixes. For instance, peri means around. If you add this to the word root cardi/o and you get pericardi/o.
Suffixes are word elements added to the end of the word root. For instance we could add al, which means pertaining to. Pericardial means pertaining to around the heart.
You can even read medical documents to see how words are put together.
You can take observe and take lesson from how doctors, nurses and other people in the office speak the medical parlance and how they use the terms.
You stand to gain a lot even by asking questions to those around you or those using a medical dictionary.
Each day learn a new word root, prefix and/or suffix each day.
Be curious to knowAbout the Author:
The world of medical coding is one of the fastest growing in the medical field, but many would-be medical coders do not realize the full spectrum of employment opportunities. So getting updated and knowing more about medical billing and coding career information
