For over ten years, instructor Pamela Biffle CPC, CPC-I, CHCC, CHCO has been preparing people to pass the Certified Professional Coder exam, so we were thrilled when she agreed to share some of her sage advice with us.
Think like a teacher
Biffle teaches coders fresh out of college classrooms, as well as coders with a lot of work experience who want to boost their careers with a CPC. And despite their inexperience, programmers fresh out of college classes have a head start when it comes to the exam, he reports.
This is because people who have been to school recently have learned to “think like teachers” because their success in class has been related to how well they can predict the kinds of things their instructors will put on tests and exams. . But experienced coders, who are more used to the real world, can develop an advantage of their own by spending some time developing CPC exam skills, says Biffle, who spends most of the classes he teaches for Coding Cert taking exams. .
Biffle advises experienced programmers to forget the idiosyncratic guidelines of operators when taking the exam. To correctly answer CPC questions, you have to rely on the official guidelines in your ICD-9 and CPT manuals, and some coders who have been dealing with operators a lot are not as familiar with the official guidelines as they should be. pass the exam.
Can you answer this sample question from the CPC exam??
When teachers write multiple-choice tests, they often like to include one option that is really wrong (a gift), one option that is wrong, and a couple of options that are plausible.Biffle explains. And the people who write the CPC also think like teachers. You can save time during the exam by eliminating “the wrong, wrong, and totally wrong options,” he says. As you choose from the most plausible answers, it is helpful to consider in which coding principle the question is trying to test you.
Let’s see how this works with this simple CPC exam sample question.
Provide the correct ICD-9-CM code for choledocholithiasis with obstruction.
A. 574.50
B. 574.51
C. 574.91
D. 574.90
The correct answer is B. To understand how to quickly answer a question like this, let’s turn to section 574.xx of our ICD-9 manual.
If we look at the pink box under 574 (cholelithiasis), we read that we use the fifth digit 0 for “no mention of obstruction” and the fifth digit 1 for “with obstruction.” Because the question mentions “with obstruction”, we immediately have two “wrong, wrong, totally wrong” answers: Answers A and D, which have the fifth digit 0.
Many CPC exam questions try to get you to look at the details in the coding scenario to correctly choose between the codes. Unlike some doctors’ documentation (which can be vague, as experienced coders know), the exam questions tell you what you need to know to select the correct code.