Free Medical Billing Training

Mini Courses
I've found there are some free “Mini Courses” online that are simply a very generalized document a few pages long or a short video presentation of their material. The hope is that you'll be impressed enough to commit to purchase the entire training program.

Be careful – I fell for this and spent several hundred dollars. It was an impressive looking website and slick marketing. All I got was a notebook of general information I could have easily found on the web. Boy did I feel like a fool! And forget trying to get a refund.

Hold On to Your Credit Card
Also be wary of free medical billing training trial programs that require you to enter credit card information before viewing their free material. Supposedly if you decide not to take the complete course you have to call to cancel. I'm suspicious of anybody that wants a credit card up front. Once they get your credit card number it can be very difficult to get a refund or prevent them from charging you.

I've done this with other "free" offers before and found it almost impossible to cancel and get them to stop charging my credit card.

There are ways you can get free medical billing training:

Get Real World Experience
Offer to work part time for a medical billing service for free - for a limited time of course. When I was anxious to learn medical billing, I offered to work for free. My thinking was that is a great way to get hands-on real world training.

I had a friend who started a medical billing business and was very busy. I talked to her about how she got started and asked for her advice. During our conversations I offered to work for free for a short time until I learned enough to start my own business.

Medical billing is the sort of work that can be done at home easily. Fortunately they didn't take me up on the free part but did pay me for part time work from home. To me that was like getting paid to learn!

I started out working on insurance aging which involved calling insurance companies to follow up on unpaid claims and determine why they were rejected. I got progressively more experience and responsibilities until I felt comfortable marketing my own business.

If you are starting a medical billing business, this is an excellent time to cultivate contacts and network - especially if it's in a practice.

Get Paid to Learn
Even better than free medical billing training is the thought of getting paid to learn. Like I mentioned above, any environment you can get into - even for pay that is less than the going rate - that allows you some experience in the field is a great help toward getting trained. This would be short term of course.

Consider opportunities at a medical billing services company, hospital or doctors office, or insurance company. Anything that gets you exposed to the field looks good on your resume. Remember your goal is getting experience - so a short term sacrifice in pay may be worth it to prove yourself and get good references.

One of the requirements I notice in medical billing job postings is experience in the field - probably more than training or credentials for medical billing. That's why getting any experience you can is important. In this field there are many things that can't be taught in a classroom environment.

Research the Internet for Free Medical Billing Training
There's so much information available on medical billing via the internet that you can educate yourself and find information on just about any topic. The problem is being able to separate the credible and knowledgeable from the pretenders.

Even on this site I try to document my experience, information, and other free medical billing training resources that may be helpful to others getting started in the medical billing and coding profession.

I found it can be difficult to find any in depth of information on particular topics. This takes a lot of time. There is a lot of online information on medical billing that seems to be almost entirely dedicated to marketing and not educating. These sites are just trying to sell something. Or on the opposite end of the spectrum having so much information that it's overwhelming.

Industry Topics
An example of this would be the HIPAA. There's a tremendous amount of information about HIPAA available at CMS – The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. But trying to determine what is relevant and applicable to a small practice is almost overwhelming as there's so many facets of HIPAA.

A lot of billing services are smart to educate themselves well on HIPAA (and other industry issues) and use this to educate, and market to, small practices. This is a great way to open doors.

A Low Cost Alternative...
Starting at $197, I found the Medical Billing Home Business in a Box! is a great resource for learning medical billing and the business of medical billing. It's a comprehensive package of books and materials written by owners of a successful medical billing business in New York.

The authors Alice and Michele have compiled their knowledge and experience in an easy to read and understand format. I wish this was available when I was getting started – it would have saved me a lot of time and money.

Our Medical Billing Books page also lists all the other books that Alice and Michele have authored. I've found them to be a great economical way to learn medical billing.

Other Free Medical Billing Training Resources
We've added free resources to this site to help those wanting to learn medical billing. These are also listed on our Free Stuff page:

The Medical Billing Terms Glossary is a quick reference of medical billing terms I’ve compiled to help understand the terminology of medical billing. It’s a PDF file that can saved locally or printed out. This is also available on the site on our Medical Billing Terms Glossary page.

Our Medical Billing and Coding Careers Guide is a 15 page overview of medical billing for those considering a career in medical billing or a medical coding career. It's kind of a condensed compilation of information available on the site in more detail. It may be helpful as a free medical billing training resource to explain the basics.

Something else that would have been helpful to me when getting into medical billing was something that explained how an insurance claim is processed.

The Medical Billing Insurance Claim Flowchart is another free medical billing training tool that shows a very simple flowchart explaining how healthcare claim processing works and how insurance claims billing works.

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Return from Free Medical Billing Training to Medical Billing and Coding Training