Effective Time Management Strategies for Completing BHAT™ Codebooks

Q: [BHAT] “I am having trouble managing my time to finish BHAT my codebooks. Between my college classes and work and CCO, any suggestions” A: It’s not hard to do. You could actually do it while watching TV, like maybe you’re decompressing after work or whatever, as the kids go to bed. Instead of just sitting there, which I know would be preferred, but while you’re in study mode, get your books out and just sit at the dining room, kitchen table and do it while you’re watching TV. Or something else, listening to the news, so that you can multitask. You just got to take the time and do it. Now, what I recommend to students doing, say, the Blitz or one of the coding courses, don’t try and bubble and highlight your whole book and then go and listen to lectures. Do it just prior to the lecture you’re about to listen to. So, if you’re about to do the digestive surgery section, bubble and highlight that section of CPT. Get it all bubbled first then go and highlight. That’s how I do it. I do all the circles first so I have the same writing implement in my hand, pencil, pencil, make my circles. Then I go back and take my yellow highlighter and I highlight everything after the semicolon for that section. Then I go back if I have access to the BHAT note, I just write the key notes that were shared, and then I go and I listen to the lecture, now my books done. If I pick up another point that I want to write in my book, I go ahead and do that. Or later on, if you read an article or something that’s come out and you want make that note, go ahead and write that in the book. That’s a better way to do it and it’s less overwhelming. If that was just the prep work prior to the lecture; that’s how I used to when I taught this in a 20-week course, that was part of their homework. They had to bubble and highlight that section that I was going to lecture on. Alicia: I think that something that people get confused with or is a misconception about the BHAT technique, this is a technique, this isn’t something that you have to look at every page that we give you of the template because as Laureen said, go right and bubble it. She tells you how and what you’re looking for to bubble the sections. You could do that really quick where you just flip a page. There’s nothing else that you have to look at to do that. Then, go back and highlight. She tells you these are the things you need to highlight after it was the semicolon, what differentiates this code from this code, you’re going to highlight that. Again, some people think that they have to have that template and they got to go and do it one at a time. No. Laureen: It’s become more complicated than it needs to. Sometimes we get to relying on being kind of spoon-fed some stuff, but if you take a step back, the purpose of it is to visually draw your eye to the groups of codes. The whole CPT manual with a few exceptions has parent codes with indented codes. Sometimes it’s just one parent code that’s called a standalone code, so you don’t bubble it, you don’t draw a circle around it. But any parent code with any indented codes, you draw a circle around including any parenthetical notes at the bottom of the group and that’s your bubble, that’s your grouping. They’re all the same, parent codes with indented codes. You don’t have to see how I bubbled it because they’re all the same, parent codes with bubble codes. So, if you just do that without trying to look at our copy of my manual, you’ll go so much quicker. Then, highlighting is the same. It’s everything after the semicolon. In a parent code, there’s normally a little semicolon, it’s hard to see that’s why I started this method. Even if there was nothing after it, I would just highlight the space. Everything indented, what comes after the semicolon, so you would highlight everything if that was indented. It makes that group stand out. Standalone code doesn’t have a semicolon, you don’t need to highlight so I normally use pale yellow for all my highlighting after the semicolon so I go through and do that. Then, I go back.