Billing Bonanza: Improving Resident Knowledge of the 2021 Revised American Medical Association Outpatient Billing Guidelines Through Gamification

Abstract

Introduction: Residents often feel unprepared for independent practice, citing an unfamiliarity with billing as a common cause. Gamification has been well studied as a means to engage learners but not as a way to improve resident knowledge of outpatient billing guidelines. Methods: We delivered a session to incoming PGY 1 residents with a goal of improving billing proficiency. The session included a pretest and posttest questionnaire, a prerecorded PowerPoint lecture, and Billing Bonanza, a game with instructions and rules that used gamification to reinforce billing concepts. Results: Residents demonstrated improvement in percentage of correctly answered questions from 42% on the pretest to 67% on the posttest, which resulted in a statistically significant increase of 0.24 questions correct. Discussion: This session led to improvement in baseline billing knowledge.