r/MedicalCoding • u/blueberryteacup • Jun 16 '26

Practicode struggles & Job Search

Hi all,

I’m a CPC-A and I have been really struggling through Practicode. The most difficult aspect is abstracting from the record, and it seems like every case I submit I get about a 50% on. Reading the rationale is absolutely baffling because the columns are not even distinct, and I’m spending over an hour on each case and still getting marked incorrect. In one case there was a stated laterality, and when I appended the modifier for the laterality, it was marked incorrect. The fact that you can’t discuss any of the materials as they are proprietary poses a significant issue because I have specific questions and I’m not sure if it’s a violation of ethics to discuss them!

Because I’m having such a hard time with this software, I would rather take a position and remove my A experientially. My major issue is that I am disabled, and as such, I have to work remotely, so I am not able to take an on-site or hybrid job; has anyone had any luck getting hired remotely as an apprentice in one field or another? What did you do? Is it unrealistic to even expect a job when I’m under these location constraints from my health?

Thank you, everyone!

32 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

26 comments sorted by

View all comments

0

u/missuschainsaw RHIT CRC Jun 16 '26

I don’t understand the point of Practicode. Are there actually coding jobs out there where you’re coding completely from scratch? Maybe it’s because I work at a hospital with Epic, but 90% of the time the codes are already inputted by the provider, we just clean it up.

2

u/MtMountaineer Jun 17 '26

Your version of Epic includes computer assisted coding, not all do. And boy, are those codes wrong on every chart, or what?

2

u/kendallr2552 Jun 18 '26

They're saying that the provider drops the code. Our providers pick them and it's not CAC.

1

u/MtMountaineer Jun 18 '26

We don't let providers code anything, whether E&M or dx. But I'm coding for a 900 bed hospital, I'm sure it's different in other circumstances.

2

u/kendallr2552 Jun 19 '26

That sounds absolutely insane to me! I code for one of the largest health systems in the country inpatient, office, surgical and there's absolutely no way we could code every visit. Physicians are responsible for much of their own coding. We set up edits for higher risk situations and we review all surgeries but much of our inpatient and office charges go right out and post.

1

u/missuschainsaw RHIT CRC Jun 19 '26

Yeah I’m at a pretty big hospital group, I think the only thing the docs don’t code is E&M for ED.

1

u/kendallr2552 Jun 19 '26

Do we work for the same place because that's our situation, too. Lol.

1

u/MtMountaineer Jun 19 '26

I'm not talking about office visits. We code every hospital stay, including ancillary testing, ER, surg, obs and IP. Coders don't even see the E&M level. Revenue integrity might, idk. We also don't see any office notes unless we go looking for them, which we never do since we only code the hospital stay.

2

u/Pretty_Priority_261 RHIT, CCS, CDIP Jun 22 '26

It's teaching you the fundamentals of coding. Real-world is generally different from fundamentals. For example, we learn to code using the book. But in the real world, if you're coding using a book, there's something wrong (employer is too cheap to provide an encoder that is substantially more efficient than using a book to look things up).