Do it yourself: A personal approach to coding

By creating his own handheld computer program, family physician Andre Chen, MD, didn't just find a way to remember complex E&M codes -- he also birthed a one-person company that is giving him some extra income.

By Tyler Chin, AMNews staff. May 13, 2002.

Sometimes inefficiency pays off. Three years ago, Andre S. Chen, MD, was struck by the sheer inefficiency of learning the federal evaluation and management documentation guidelines so he could bill appropriately.

The complexity of the guidelines made it impossible for him to memorize them, forcing him to use paper templates or to guess what elements he needed to document higher level E&M services. To address the problem, he decided to write handheld-based software that he could use as a handy coding and documentation reference tool.

He bought some books, taught himself how to program, wrote the program, Stat E&M Coder, and then set up StatCoder.com. The "virtual" software company sells the coding software Dr. Chen created to improve his own efficiency and earns the doctor a nice chunk of change on top of his day job as a family physician at the Austin (Texas) Diagnostic Clinic, a 130-doctor multispecialty group.

"It's all virtual," Dr. Chen said. "There's no phone number, and business is all done by e-mail."

Thus far, the approach is paying off financially. Sales will reach about $60,000 this year. And because the virtual approach keeps costs -- and risks -- very low, most of that money will go directly into his pockets, Dr. Chen said.

Unlike traditional software companies, a virtual company does not need to have gobs of capital to operate, or have a large sales force or high margins to make money, said Dr. Chen, whose competitors include Medical Informatics Inc., a Tahoe City, Calif.-based company owned by Mark H. Spohr, MD, a former emergency physician. While Dr. Spohr was an electrical engineer and a programmer before he was a physician, Dr. Chen was a doctor who became a programmer. [...]