We’re Number 3!

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Yahoo! recently published a list of the top 5 fastest growing jobs in the medical field.  Medical Records and Health Information Technician took the number 3 place on the list!  With a very attractive average annual salary, medical billing and coding specialists can anticipate continued strength in the job market for people with their qualifications.  Click here to view the list and the entire article.

Access Your Files From Anywhere

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One of the best parts about online study is that you can study whenever you carve the time out to do so.  And, you’re not tethered to any one particular location.  For many of us that means we can study wherever we can bring our laptop.  Think, coffee shop, airport, friend’s houses, etc.  But, even that level of portability can become cumbersome.  Particularly if you’re not keen on moving around with a very expensive laptop or other device.  Yet, you can work wherever there is a machine available.  Think, library, hotel business center, Kinko’s or on friend’s machines at their homes.  To do this though, you need to be able to access your own files from a remote machine.  This has grown increasingly simple in recent years as “cloud computing” and other technological innovations have permitted such accessibility.  Here’s an excellent “how to” article on using these new “sharing” technologies from the Hot To Wiki at Wired.com.

Fascinating Answers to Gripping Medical Questions

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What causes “brain freeze” when eating ice cream or other cold treats too fast?  Admit it, you have always wanted to know why that happens right?  I know I have.   With today being the first day of summer, and the Northeastern humidity already squeezing beads of sweat out of my forehead, I am sure the local custard stand in every neighborhood is seeing increased business traffic.  So watch out.  Brain freeze is lurking just around the corner.  Waiting to make you ache as you consume your chocolate-vanilla twist with rainbow sprinkles.  The nice people at Mother Nature Network have answered the question “what causes brain freeze” in detail in the article linked here.  As a future member of the medical field, you’ll need to know the answers to pressing questions like this one.

They Said It Couldn’t Be Done

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If you’re just beginning your course of study with the Allen School Online, you may be wondering if you can make it.  Perhaps you were forced out of another career path by the economy.  Maybe there are people in your life who tell you its a mistake and that you cannot succeed in this new direction.  Let me urge you to tell the naysayers and nattering nabobs of negativity to stifle their criticisms.  You can do this!  Anything that one sets one’s mind to accomplish can be done if the determination and dedication is there.  Consider the image at the top of this post.  If you had asked people “Is it possible to build a river ON TOP of another river” you would likely have a hard time finding someone who would say it were possible.  Yet, engineers and physicists in Germany did this seemingly impossible feat.  This demonstrates the potential for success if the will is strong to pursue it.  Share these images with anyone in your life who wants to dissuade you from your goal.  Click “more” to see the rest of these phenomenal photos. Continue reading…

Honoring Thy Father

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Maybe your dad was the person who motivated you to seek your medical billing and coding certification.  Maybe you’re a dad who decided to retrain in this field to secure a better job to support your children.  Maybe neither of these things are true about you.  Nonetheless, we all owe a debt of gratitude to our fathers for their contributions to our lives.  I for one thank my pop for all he did to help promote my education as a youth.  He worked untold hours to ensure that I got the opportunity to attend good schools and get a solid education.  This Sunday is Father’s Day.  So don’t forget to send a shout out to your pops and let them know how much you love them.  Oh, and if you run into my son, please remind him to do the same.

Dress for Success or, The Idiot’s Guide to Ironing

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Having your new certification and a brain full of knowledge is great, but as we all know, landing a job often comes down to making a good first impression at the interview.  Part of making that good first impression is obviously the way you speak and interact with the interviewer and how you convey your qualifications.  Yet, even more subtle but no less important is the visual first impression you make.  How you’re dressed and how you take care of your appearance is a powerful, unspoken indicator of how you will be as an employee.  To this point, it is critical that you wear appropriate clothes and that these clothes are nicely pressed and creased in the proper places.  This brings me to the point.  I don’t know about you, but I cannot afford to spend $12 per outfit to the dry cleaner for pressed shirts and pants.  Furthermore, I am challenged when it comes to ironing these items myself.  That was until I found this great post on Lifehacker.com explaining the finer points on DIY clothes pressing.  Read up on how to bone up your appearance and show up at the interview crispy, smart and ready to impress.

Resumè Samples

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Getting ready to capture the return on your investment into online job training and education?  That means you’ll be taking your newly earned certification out to the market to land yourself a j-o-b.  The first step in that process is to line up some interviews.  And that means putting together a new resumè.  This is a task that a lot of people find daunting.  But, have no fear.  The best way to understand how to structure all the job history and qualifications information into a memorable resumè is to see some examples of other peoples’ resumès.  Here’s a great list of about 90 resumes from the folks at Monster.com, collected from people seeking many different kinds of positions.  Even if some of the samples are for jobs in other industries, it is still very instructive to see how people structure the information they include.  Have a look at some of these and remember, what you leave off a resumè is just as important as what you include.

Leading Edge of Medical Innovation

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How lucky you are to be entering into such an exciting field?  The field of medicine has made significant advances in the last 100 years.  Quantum advances.  Advances that would have been scoffed at as flights of science fiction fancy by medical contemporaries in 1911.  Case in point, Mitch Hunter, a man whose face was dramatically disfigured in a car accident.  At age 30, he has successfully undergone a face transplant.  (No, not a face plant like this old blogger makes when trying to ride his 6 year old’s skateboard!)  I’m talking about an actual face transplant.  Only the seventh successful such surgery in the world.  Click here to read more about this fantastic medical advancement and be stoked to be training in a career field that holds such enormous potential for good.

June is Prevention and Wellness Month

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OK, so the stereotype of the online denizen (this includes peeps like me who work in front of a computer all day, and peeps like you who study online in front of a computer) is a sedentary, Cheetos munching lot who cringes when the curtains are drawn open and light shines in.  All kidding aside though, in today’s modern life, it can be hard to carve out enough time to spend on health and wellness.  Kathleen Sebelius, the Obama administration’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has declared June to be Prevention and Wellness month. In a recent article on the Huffington Post Sebelius said, ” We know there’s more to good health than going to the hospital when you get sick. Good health starts with steps we can all take to avoid getting sick in the first place, from getting regular check-ups, vaccinations, and recommended screenings, to eating a healthy diet and getting enough exercise.”  This blogger concurs with this line of thinking and has even taken the drastic step of adding a SECOND walk for his self and his dog Henry every day to try and keep physically fit.  So online students, save your work, take a pause and consider what you can do to boost your own health and wellness in June and for the future.

Got MRSA?

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According to a Reuter’s article, scientists have found Methicillin-Resistant Staphylococcus Aurelius in raw milk samples in the US and UK.  The superbug has been growing in prevalence and represents a significant challenge to medicine because it is an infection that, as the name implies, is resistant to antibiotics.  Concurrent to this story is the outbreak of a new strain of E. Coli across Europe.  It would seem to this blogger that both these outbreaks are rooted, at least in part, in the practices of large corporate food producers and the sometimes shoddy agricultural processes in which they engage.  Read these past posts, here, here and here for more information on both MRSA and animal husbandry/food safety.