For over ten years, Pamela Biffle CPC, CPC-I, CHCC, CHCO instructor has been preparing people to pass the Certified Professional Programmer exam, so we were very excited when she agreed to share some of her wise advice with U.S.
think like a teacher
Biffle teaches programmers just out of college classrooms, as well as programmers with a lot of work experience who want to further their careers with a CPC. And despite their inexperience, programmers fresh out of college have a head start when it comes to the exam, she reports.
That’s because people who have been in school recently have learned to “think like teachers” because their success in class has been tied to how well they can predict the kinds of things their instructors will put on tests and quizzes. . But experienced coders, who are more accustomed to the real world, can develop an advantage of their own if they spend some time building skills for CPC exams, says Biffle, who spends most of the classes he teaches for Coding Cert taking exams.
Biffle advises experienced coders to forget about idiosyncratic operator cues while taking the exam. To answer CPC questions correctly, you must rely on the official guidelines in your ICD-9 and CPT manuals, and some coders who have been dealing a lot with operators are not as familiar with the official guidelines as they should be in order to pass the exam.
Can you answer this sample CPC exam question??
When teachers write multiple-choice tests, they often like to include one option that is really wrong (a gimme), 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 yourself time during the exam by eliminating the “wrong, wrong, and totally wrong choices right away,” she says. As you choose among the most plausible answers, it is useful to consider what coding principle the question is trying to evaluate.
Let’s see how this works with this simple CPC exam sample question.
Give 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 go 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.” Since the question mentions “with obstruction”, we immediately have two “wrong, wrong, absolutely 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 make the right choice between 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.