Training programs in medical billing and coding routinely cost between three and fifteen thousand dollars, and until now there has been no free, complete textbook for the field. Medical Billing and Coding: The Revenue Cycle is a practitioner's guide to the whole job — forty chapters across eight parts, fourteen appendices, and a full instructor guide — that follows the money from the moment a patient checks in to the moment the last dollar is collected. It is written for people who intend to do this work: career changers entering the field, new coders and billers in their first year, practice and front-office staff who need to understand why claims are denied, and clinicians who want to see what happens to their documentation after they sign it.
Part I establishes the system itself: the revenue cycle end to end, payers and contracts, Medicare and Medicaid, clinical documentation, compliance and HIPAA, and the coder's toolkit. Six chapters then teach diagnosis coding — the structure of ICD-10-CM, the lookup discipline that keeps you out of trouble, the Official Guidelines, and three chapters of applied coding across body systems. Procedure coding follows in seven chapters on CPT: evaluation and management, surgery, radiology and pathology, medicine, and the modifier logic that determines whether a correctly coded claim actually gets paid. Further parts cover HCPCS Level II, NCCI edits, medical necessity and the price of a service through RVUs and fee schedules.
The billing half of the book is equally concrete: the CMS-1500 and UB-04 forms field by field, electronic claims and clearinghouses, payment posting and remittance advice, then denial management, the appeals ladder, accounts receivable, and patient financial responsibility. Later parts move into facility and specialty work — MS-DRGs, APCs, and HCC risk adjustment — before closing on auditing, compliance programs, certification, and building a revenue cycle career. Worked coding scenarios, an encounter workbook, denial-code and modifier references, and a certification exam study guide run through the appendices, so the book doubles as a desk reference once the coursework is done.