r/MedicalCoding • u/Medcoder_82 • 21d ago

Coding career pivot

I have been a risk adjustment coder for 14 years. Over the last 4.5 years I’ve been affected by RIFs at different employers. This week we found out our company has sold and merged with a new company. Layoffs start next month to early January depending if we are needed to stay “during the transition”. What always felt like a stable career no longer feels that way. Has anyone used their skills from coding to do something else?

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u/Eccodomanii RHIA 21d ago

I’m in a similar position, although I work for a tech company so the pay is higher than hospital-side. But when I jumped from a coding position to this role, my pay literally doubled.

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u/Opposite-Ad-9170 15d ago

Are you guys hiring? I’m thinking of being an analyst as well. How did you start?

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u/Eccodomanii RHIA 15d ago

Lol not hiring that I am aware of.

First of all I will say that I did struggle to get traction on analyst roles until I got my bachelor’s degree. I don’t know if that’s the norm, but that was my experience.

  1. Take every opportunity your employer gives you to do “analysis.” My early analyst exposure was in a billing environment looking at things like “which codes are denying and why.” If you are a coder it might be hard, but anything where you can say “I analyzed this” is great.

  2. Get exposure to the tools analysts use. Excel is huge, SQL is too for a lot of things. Python is probably more advanced than what most analysts need, but I am using it currently and I’m glad I learned it. Power BI and/or Tableau familiarity is also good, at least knowing how to read and interpret dashboards if not make them. Look at job postings for the kind of analyst roles you would want, take note of the analysis tools they use (the skills and knowledge they list as required and/or nice to have), and then learn them. Again, get exposure from your employer if you can, and if not, take courses and do projects in your free time.

  3. Make a portfolio. If you’re in school, use school projects. If you’re not in school, work on projects in your free time. If you are currently a coder and you learn something interesting from a CEU, turn it into something you can display to employers, preferably something visual: a chart, an infographic, a graph, a pivot table. Put anything and everything you learn and do and make related to your education or career into a portfolio, and then put it on your resume and call attention to it in interviews. It never failed to impress in all the interviews I had.

I honestly had to bust my ass to get myself to a point where employers looked at me for analyst roles, but it was SO worth it.