Hello folks,

I'm not sure if any of you folks out there watching me knows a thing about this sort of thing, but I'm hoping perhaps to find someone that knows someone who does at least. I've been seeking new methods of making money, and I've been considering getting into the medical coding stuff. I was fortunate enough to know someone who took the classes for this, although she hasn't done it as a job, so her information on that side of the house was limited, but I do have a large stack of books here I've been learning and researching. I would like to get in a situation where I am doing it from home (or only have 1 or 2 days/wk where I have to go to a facility) and perform coding for folks either on a contractual basis or with some firm that subs this out to a pool of coders/billers, and who pay decently.

The classes for this are about $2500 from what I'm finding, so I've been holding off on it yet due to that being a bit of a large amount of cash... but I have a cousin who's a nurse who told me that I -should- be able to skip the classes and perhaps find a tutor or someone who does do this for a living and learn the ropes to a point to pass the HIPAA exam (which apparently is where the end certificate comes from). Having gone through these books, I'm trying to learn all those crazy medical terms and get a handle on how basically the coding system works. If there is anybody out there actually doing this for a living, or has done it before, I'd really like to learn more about how all this works. Reading books is good and all, but I'd feel a lot better if I could see how it works, or even at least who I could talk to as far as possibly getting a foot in the door with doing it at home.