The purpose of a good medical billing resume is to get your foot in the door for an interview. Whether you’re just trying to get a good job in medical billing or starting a business, think of it as a sales brochure for yourself to showcase your skills and abilities. Use my sample resume as a guide.
Even if you aren’t looking for a job and are just starting a medical billing business, having a good resume is still important. When trying to sign your first doctor, all you have is yourself to sell.
Your resume is a good tool to highlight your knowledge and relevant experience. You need something for when you get that all important face-to-face meeting with the doctor.
Sample Medical Billing Resume
Here’s a sample Medical Billing Resume I created to give an example of a simple easy-to-read resume that clearly conveys the candidates skills, accomplishments, and experience. I like this format because it’s easy to quickly look over and use as an outline during an interview. I also think resume’s with a “clean”
Medical Insurance Billing Specialist Job Description
Here’s a summary job description for an insurance billing specialist. This may be helpful when considering the characteristics and skills to emphasize for an employer. It includes the most commonly performed duties and responsibilities of medical billing and coding jobs.
Feel free to use this as a starting point for your own resume if it helps.
Essential Elements of a Resume should include:
Heading
Name address, contact info – phone number(s) and email address.ObjectiveA to-the-point statement of what you want to do. This can serve as an advertising headline describing what you have to offer.
Summary
Summarize your experience, areas of expertise, skills, traits, etc. in a concise statement. The summary emphasizes important information from the body of your resume.
Use keywords that match what your target job or client desires. Be sure to use Medical Billing terminology here. This is also a good place to high lite your knowledge of industry and regulatory issues.
Employment
Employment History/Experience with name of company, job titles, and time frames which includes the following:
Responsibilities – A paragraph for each job listed and one sentence for earlier jobs is fine. Summarize information from you job description, special duties, special assignments that would interest an employer.
Accomplishments and results – Statements that show your achievements and contributions. Three to six for your most recent job and on to three for earlier jobs is a good rule of thumb.
Education
Reverse chronological order listing. If you graduated recently you may want to include more details. If you don’t have a lot of experience, provide more info here to convey your qualifications.
Education, Training, and Certifications
Any training in addition to your education and credentials relevant to the job. If you lack experience, you would want to give a brief narrative of here of your training.
Resume Formats
There are two different types of resume formats – Chronological and Functional. The chronological resume is probably the most commonly used. It shows your work experience in reverse chronological order and shows job titles, responsibilities, periods of employment and accomplishments.
The functional resume emphasizes qualifications. This format is good when your experience has been mostly in another field or you have changed employers frequently or don’t have much work experience. Don’t omit work history on functional resume’s as that will probably raise questions but try to make it relevant.
Resume Tips
Having a professional looking medical billing resume says a lot about you. When a hiring manager is reviewing a stack of resume’s, the one’s that look professional and “clean” are more likely to selected. Here’s some tips for creating a good resume:
- Try not to use “I”. Begin sentences with action words.
- Use a direct active writing style with short concise statements.
- Use keywords that apply to your next job.
- Don’t use abbreviations the employer wouldn’t be familiar with.
- For emphasis use capital letters, dashes, underlining or bullets.
- Keep the resume to no more than two pages. “Wordy” resumes are a turn off for most people reviewing resume’s.
- Make resume visually appealing with lots of white space.Don’t use fancy fonts, odd paper sizes, or colors.
- Don’t list references – just say “available on request”.
- Customize your resume to emphasize your skills that match the employer’s requirements.
Try to keep the length to one page, two max. Most people reviewing a resume will not go past the first page – especially if it’s too wordy or busy.
As one who employs medical billers for my business, I don’t put all the emphasis on experience on a medical billing resume. I equally look for traits that shown an potential employee is trustworthy, dependable, detail oriented, and is familiar with medical and insurance terminology.
Cover Letter
Any time you submit your resume – whether by mail, fax, email – a good cover letter introducing you is essential. This is a good way to briefly emphasize your results, skills, or experience that are pertinent to the job.
Keep it simple and don’t state a specific salary. If the ad request salary requirements, show a range instead of a specific amount. This gives you negotiating room later when discussing salary. Again Microsoft has lots of good free cover letter templates available to download.