Expert Tips To Help You Crack Your Cpc Exam

Pamela Biffle, CPC, CPC-I, CHCC, CHCO, who has been preparing folks to pass the Certified Professional Coder exam for more than 10 years now, shares some of her study tips for CPC exam with us.

She trains fresh-out-of-college classroom coders as well as coders with lots of on-the-job experience who want to boost their careers with a CPC. She says that despite their inexperience, coders right out of college classes have an initial edge when it comes to the CPC exam. This is because those who've been in school recently have learned to think like teachers as their success in class has been tied to how well they can predict the kind of things their instructors will put on quizzes and exams. On the other hand, experienced coders, who are more used to the real world can develop an edge of their own if they spend some time developing their CPC exam skills.

Biffle asks seasoned coders to forget the idiosyncratic guidelines from carriers while sitting for the exam. In order to get your CPC questions right, you must rely on the official guidelines in your ICD-9 and CPT manuals.

She explains that when teachers are writing multiple choice exams, most often they include a choice that's really wrong, a choice that's wrong, and a couple of choices that are plausible. You can in fact save yourself time during the exam if you do away with the ‘wrong, wrong, dead wrong choices right away. As you pick among the more plausible answers, it helps to consider what coding principal the question is trying to test you on.

Here's some exam room tip: A lot of CPC exam questions try to get you to look at details in the coding scenario to choose properly among codes. Contrary to some doctors' documentation, which can be vague, the exam questions tell you what you need to know to select the right code.