my first President’s Message, I touched on my vision for HBMA. As part of that vision, I shared with you that I wanted to see HBMA continue to create value to help you grow as leaders and to be a place where you can learn how to better handle the challenges of running your businesses. members and prospective members of hbma have limited financial resources and, regardless of size, must carefully choose where to spend their money. there is no shortage of opportunities, so your company must make choices, and it is my strong belief that being a member of hbma is a great way to realize value for your time and money. i began to think… so why be a member? like so many, i take my membership for granted. maybe you do, too. i know each of us reaps value from our membership, but what is so unique about hbma? What is the differentiator that no other organization can supply to help our members grow? i really spent a lot of time trying to figure out why our association is so important. i thought about it, and then went to our website, www.hbma.org, and started to move around and find out about all of the resources and tools right there in front of us. that made the value proposition very easy to understand. NEWS & RESOURCES at our public website, i pulled down the first drop down and thought, “i will just click on any of the items and see what i could learn without being a member.” there i found links for icd-10, compliance resources, commercial Payor news, electronic health records, government news, hbma Billing journal, member news, Press releases, and Public news. nearly all of them are only for members and are supplemented with more links for members that deal with important topics related to each of the above categories. there is a wealth of information and resources that help our members in the billing industry to stay informed and current, and to enhance the skills to successfully run businesses. PRESIDENT’S message PROGRAMS & TOOLS then i went to the second button. there, i found additional advantages to being a member. there are 13 drop downs that are there for the taking. i won’t go into each one of them, but i would like to mention a couple of them because i think they provide really unique benefits that only members can receive. first, let us consider a practice that is looking to outsource their billing to a billing company. if you are a member and are listed in the “find a medical biller search,” they will find you. in addition, “the message board” is filled with messages especially geared to our industry where companies of like interest and needs can communicate with their peers, find answers to questions, or alert the membership to issues that are in front of us all. EDUCATION & CERTIFICATION just pull down the “hbma education eVents” option and you will then see all the incredible educational opportunities geared just for those who want to know almost anything about billing. this valuable knowledge is provided in different settings and forums. there are national conferences, webinars, and owner’s and manager’s conferences. there are compliance courses, congressional hill visit opportunities, and an in-depth, comprehensive executive development summit where a member can fulfill all the core competency modules to become a certified healthcare billing and management executive (chbme). speaking of certification, as a member, you can become a certified biller, which would show to all interested that you have gone the extra mile to achieve the next level of knowledge that will help you run your business and set you apart from other billers. if you want to be listed in the “certified medical biller search” (another benefit), you will need this certification. i really didn’t intend to write an article about our wonderful website, but it does sum up most of the value propositions. there are a couple more that i would like to point out. first, as a member you are able to become really plugged into our government advocacy efforts, where you In So, Why Be a Member of HBMA? OUR VALUE PROPOSITION (continued on page 7) the journal of the healthcare billing and management association 3
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