Medical Billing Resume Examples: What Skills Should You Include?

While your professional experience and education are important, what recruiters and employers really want to know is: do you have the right medical billing skills for the job?

With limited space on your resume (which, ideally, should be one or two pages maximum), it’s important to pick the right skills. You should also be prepared to back them up with evidence.

So if you’re preparing your medical billing and coding resume, keep reading. We’ll break down how to present skills on your resume, where they should go and which skills you should include.

Where Should You Include Medical Billing Resume Skills?

Most medical billing applicants will benefit from a hybrid resume structure. This means that you have a dedicated skills section at the top of your resume, immediately after your contact details and professional summary. Include your most important skills here.

You should also refer to skills in the work history section, along with accomplishments and key responsibilities. However, remember that recruiters often skim-read resumes, so medical billing skills in your work history section may be overlooked.

How To Include Medical Billing And Coding Skills On Your Resume

Follow these three tips to make sure your medical billing resume skills stand out, whether your resume is being reviewed by a recruiter or an automated applicant tracking system (ATS).

1. Use The Exact Phrasing From The Job Listing

Read the job listing carefully and highlight any skills that it mentions. Make sure to include these in your resume — providing you do in fact have them, of course!

Avoid re-phrasing the skills. For example, if the job listing states “communication skills”, don’t change it to “communicated well with team members.” Recruiters will often skim-read for the important details, which means they could overlook synonyms (such as “IT skills,” “computer skills” and “tech-savviness”) and rephrased skills.

Plus, if they are using ATS or machine reading to create an applicant longlist, they might have set it to automatically discard any resumes without these skills.

2. Adopt A Reader-Friendly Format

Skills can easily be missed if they’re buried in the middle of lengthy paragraphs. Particularly in the dedicated skills section, opt for a bullet-point list. Use one bullet point per skill.

You can also include additional information in the bullet point, e.g. “Communication skills (email, phone and in person).” However, make sure that there’s plenty of white space. This will make your resume more reader-friendly and increase the chance of the recruiter reading more of it.

3. Include Evidence

Where possible, you should include concise evidence for your skills within the healthcare industry. This will help your resume stand out from other applicants’ resumes.

The best evidence will be quantitative, i.e. using numbers, or linked to accomplishments. This is because numbers and accomplishments are typically more memorable and impressive. For example, you could write: “HIPAA compliance (scored 100% on HIPAA compliance training course).”

You can also provide evidence for skills with anecdotes and responsibilities, e.g. “attention to detail: commended by team leader for lack of errors” or “people skills: demonstrated empathy for patients with insurance challenges.” However, this format takes up more space, which makes it better suited to descriptions of your work history.

Must-Include Medical Billing And Coding Skills For Your Resume

We’ve already mentioned the importance of using the skills from the job listing, complete with the same phrasing. However, there is a wide range of hard and soft skills that you could also choose to include. Some of these overlap, but each one is an important medical billing skill.

• Medical coding: ICD-11, ICD-10-CM, ICD-10-PCS, CPT and HCPCS
• Knowledge of medical vocabulary
• HIPAA compliance
• Data security
• Patient confidentiality
• Familiarity with Medicare, Medicaid and other insurance programs
• Insurance eligibility verification
• Invoicing and claim preparation
• Book-keeping skills
• Auditing
• Data analysis
• Computer savviness
• Knowledge of popular medical billing systems, e.g. DrChrono, Kareo Billing, CureMD
• Quick learner
• Punctuality
• Attention to detail; you rarely make billing mistakes or typos
• Organization skills; you never miss a deadline
• Communication skills; you communicate well with patients and insurers alike
• People skills
• Customer service
• Empathy; you understand that this can be a challenging situation for many patients
• Problem-solving; you can create payment plans or resolve billing issues
• Math skills
• Conflict management
• Team skills

Discussing Medical Billing Skills In Job Interviews

Writing your resume is just the first step to achieving your dream job as a medical billing and coding expert. The second step, after your resume has successfully impressed recruiters, is the job interview.

You can expect recruiters to ask you about specific medical billing skills in the interview. These may be the skills from your resume, or they might be ones that you didn’t think to include.

Assuming you have this skill, answer using quantitative evidence or the STAR (situation, task, action, result) model. For example, for conflict management, you could say:

“I remember a patient who believed their medical treatment would be covered by their insurance, but it wasn’t (situation). My job was to explain this to them (task). I took the time to listen carefully to their situation and show empathy, before explaining exactly why it wasn’t included and what their options were (action).

“While it was still distressing for them, they gave feedback that my empathy helped them feel listened to and supported (result).”

Alternatively, the interviewers might ask about a technical skill that you don’t have. In this case, don’t try to bluff it. Recruiters will realize that you’re lying.

Instead, acknowledge that you don’t have this skill, but explain that you’re a quick learner and would happily work on it. Then, mention a time you developed and used a similar skill. E.g. if asked about familiarity with software that you haven’t used, you could talk about how you became proficient with similar software. Alternatively, you can explain what steps you would take to learn this technical skill.

The most important thing here is to show an eagerness to learn. Demonstrate curiosity about the skill.

Highlight Your Medical Billing Skills & More On Your Resume

Your resume should place your medical billing and coding skills front and center so they stand out to time-pressed recruiters and employers.

However, including the right medical billing skills is only one part of building an impressive resume. From the professional summary to your work history, every section of your resume should be optimized.

Your resume must highlight your unique skills, impressive experiences and educational background. It also needs to be machine-readable, concise and attractively laid out. You don’t want your excellent traits to be overlooked because of a poor font choice or text-heavy format.

That’s where our medical billing resume templates come in. Each one is machine-readable, professional and easy to customize. Plus, our resume builder tool will guide you through selecting the ideal structure and recruiter-approved phrasing based on your background.

With our tools, you can craft your resume in just 10 minutes. Take the stress out of resume writing and build your resume now.