Faculty

Karen Marsh, RN, MSN
Karen Marsh is President of Kare-Med Consulting, a healthcare consulting company that specializes in emergency department financial improvement and EN-Chart Scanning Program, a documentation and coding program for hospital emergency departments. She has more than twenty-five years experience in the emergency medicine arena. Her experiences include, 5 years Senior Vice President of a National emergency medicine practice management group, 2 years in marketing and development of an emergency medicine data management and optical imaging program, and more than twenty years in hospital clinical and management positions. She has a Master’s Degree in Emergency Care with a major in administration and a minor in education. She lectures and writes frequently on topics related to emergency medicine. She has trained nurses to be coders and auditors for hospitals and has sponsored APCs and the emergency department training program for the past two years.

Kurt Breeding, RN, BSN, CPC-H
Kurt Breeding is a managing partner for Clinical Coding Specialists, a company that specializes in coding expertise related to emergency medicine, outpatient facility coding, orthopedics and interventional radiology. He also serves as the Supervisor of Charge Audit for a large Midwestern hospital. He supervises a team of six nurse auditors who have charge and coding responsibilities in the emergency department, cardiovascular lab, and the interventional radiology department. He is also responsible for internal consulting on appropriate coding and charging for various departments and serves as a team leader on the hospital’s charge processes quality improvement team. He has taught nurses to be coders and auditors for the past two years and regularly conducts educational classes on coding and charging. He has a Bachelor of Science in Nursing as well as a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. He is a Certified Professional Coder-Hospital.

Sharon L. Nicka, RN, CPC
Sharon L. Nicka is president and CEO of Nicka & Associates, Inc., a coding, compliance and consulting company specializing in emergency medicine. With over thirty years of experience in emergency medicine, Sharon’s expertise is in facility and professional coding, reimbursement, physician and nurses documentation training, compliance and emergency department process improvement. She currently serves on the Florida State ACEP Chapter Medical Economics Committee and Texas State ACEP Chapter Government Affairs Committee and is a former long standing committee member of the Coding and Nomenclature National ACEP. Sharon is a regularly featured columnist for Emergency Physician’s Monthly and a nationally recognized speaker and educator in the ED arena.