in this articl i will give you a quick overview of what you need to know before taking the cpc exam on my channel i provide tips, tricks and tutorials to help you succeed in a medical coding career
I want to go through some things that are really important so that you can be prepared, hopefully this article will answer all those questions or concerns you may have so that everything goes smoothly for your big exam day, so first thing important to understand is that this exam will test you on concepts, it will not only be a possible search for a code in a type of cpt book test, it will really test you on the knowledge of the guidelines by understanding the difference between anno Domini positioned fracture or not broken down.
understand how to measure lesions understand how to sequence icd-10-cm codes you may have some questions that are a little more simplistic in their research nature, but in reality your knowledge of the guidelines and how to apply them will be tested and you understand that if you are taking it in person with other applicants first of all they may have studied this could be like a degree program
associate or an undergraduate degree they have been studying to prepare them for this exam for a long time and they may finish faster the other thing to understand is these are aapc exam test areas they are not cpc exam test areas in person so other people may not be taken by the others taking the cpc exam so if you see someone else finishing much sooner don't panic as they may take a specialty exam and have worked in that specialty for 10 years or may i am taking a completely different credentials exam so
don't panic if you see someone finishing before you or answering questions faster than you because they may not take the same exam i don't remember which certification i was sitting for but i do remember there was one where a lady was doing her pediatric specialty exam and had been working in pediatrics for years and years and years, so it's it was very easy for her to pass those exams quickly and she finished in half the time it took that was allotted for the exam another important thing to understand about the cpc exam is that you are allowed to book your cpt your icd book- 10-cm and your hickpix book definitely check the aapc website on the specifics of what is allowed for the books i will actually link it below so you are not allowed a medical dictionary many people ask questions about which
medical dictionary should I bring on the exam you are not allowed to bring a medical dictionary to the exam if there are certain terms you like oh god i can never remember what this term means you can write them in one of your books in your cpt or in your icd-10- cm but there are not many questions on the exam which are specific to medical terminology but will obviously be mixed with the textual and
contextual things of the exam questions if you don't understand the medical terminology it will cut your time because if you have to constantly search for terms and remembering where I wrote it in my books which will surely extend the time you have to answer those questions now the exam itself is one hundred percent multiple choice and this is something that there have been a lot of questions about for 2022 because there has been a change in the case studies without quotes which we will talk about i will talk more in depth so definitely stay around but the questions you can see on the eepc site say they are a hundred multiple choice questions as well you can often do things like use the deletion process,
I always suggest that you read the question itself and the answers first because sometimes you may have something that is a two page soap note or long operation note and when you get to the end you realize that what they are actually asking for is something rather simplistic and you can better scan that note to pinpoint exactly where you need to focus you and abstract, you know if you're just focusing on trying to read a two-page operational note and going oh my god what is all this i should choose i dont know what i should pay attention to and then you get to the end and they are like icd - 10cm codes now you have to go back and go oh yeah what were the icd-10cm codes so read that question first so that when you go back and read that case you know you should focus your attention on icd-10 codes- cm than the procedure itself or you may lose
ok to those four multiple choice options and i realize the only difference between one of them is maybe a modifier and so the difference between another is that you know the cpt code is different you are like you could just passgo to the cpt code and see which of these two options is actually i have a whole playlist you can watch i will link it below and i will also put it at the end of this video which go through some questions you can get familiar with how to go through that deletion process l 'whole playlist is just cpc exam tips you can also find it on the main page of this channel for 2022 cpc exam is 100 questions is four hours long and each of those hundred questions has exactly the same weight which
means that each is worth a point so you need to get 70 correct questions to get a positive grade and that 70 is 70 in total so even if you lose all your hick photo questions and get zero questions choose the correct questions you can still get a positive vote because it's been 70 years all so one thing they will do that will really help your strategy in 2022 is that they have grouped together the case studies that the cpc exam has simpler re had case studies they just mixed them where you could have one in 40 000 cpt series and one in 60.000 series you might have an em now they have taken those cases that if you have medical coding training books like this is mine of the 2021 this is all full of cases so when they say case studies this is what these big long cases are talking about now in these the ones you do in the
workbook are not multiple choice your exam will be multiple choice so if you are in a cpc resume program and you have this workbook this now will be a great practice for those case studies because all those case studies are exactly the same point of a question asking you what cardiomegaly means, you can probably answer what cardiomegaly means an enlarged heart very quickly but it will take you longer to get through a case study so you want to get that point for that short question before diving gert yourself in those longer questions and now that the case studies are kind of all in one section you can see them visually i think they said they are holding them until the end of the exam so when you get your exam booklet you can go oh yes i will wait and do these case studies at the end because it will
take longer and you will absolutely want to fill them all in bubbles and make sure you do it within your allotted time because once they call the time your four hours are up even if you have five or six questions you still have to fill in the exam grid which you need to fill in with your number two pencils or even to take online once time is up you cant just go oh well i just need to fill them in once time is up time is up if you come caught filling out the answer grid after the time you can be disqualified from the exam so be careful when you only have maybe five minutes left and if you have any questions to which you have not yet filled in the answer go back and fill them all in whatever strategy you want if you
want to fill them sporadically if you want to fill them all see you know whatever your thought process is because as long as it is filled you have at least one in four chance that maybe you have chosen the right answer but if you leave it blank you have zero and four chances that it is automatically wrong now another thing to understand the cpc exam which is different from other types of certification exams is that they are taught by volunteers so usually exams in person they are hosted by local chapters which is a team of volunteers that get together to host educational events and host exams so since they don't
have an exam center because they don't have an institution to work in regularly they borrow space they could rent it from a hotel they could take it on loan from the hospital they could borrow it from you know a local school so they don't always have the co I monitor some of those environmental factors such as if something goes off the intercom or if there is a temperature problem, so it is recommended that you dress in person in layers and wear it as a t-shirt and then a jacket you can put on or a hoodie because sometimes it might get cold or blurt out and you want to be layered so you can feel
comfortable during the exam because the people who are there supervise and make sure you or you "conforming to the exam may not be in control about some of those environmental factors actually the time of the story I was once hosting the local seminar of my chapters and the room temperature started to get freezing cold and all the attendees were like oh my god we "would put on their jackets on the gloves, they were just absolutely freezing cold, I came to find that one of the fellow officers was
actually having hot flashes and asked people who were keeping the room down continuously lowers the temperature because he thought it was really hot in there because he had hot flashes, so yes, dress in layers in case you have to adjust to one of those temperature changes on your exam now if you are testing online yourself you need to make sure you check your environment then make sure the appropriate temperature is set because you will not be able to leave and go change it and come back
you know there are certain requirements for online exams your desk needs to be cleared you cannot have dogs scratching at yours door you can't have the TV in the background anything that sounds like any kind of noise regardless of whether or not it's someone feeding you the exam answers it's just any noise it's not allowed around actually l The online exam has very strict requirements as you have to have an external video camera cannot be a built-in laptop camera a gotta have something external so they can see your desk i actually have this on amazon
i think so i will link it below if you are bringing it online and want something so you can position it correctly so you can make sure they see your keyboard and all adequately many webcams only have a small thumbscrew at the bottom so this it's just a standard video screw you can screw in so if you get a webcam with one of these you can get a little stand and move it around more webcams these days are pretty good quality, they are very plug and play so look for a 1080 webcam and you should be good,
no matter what you get now with the online exam you can't have anything on your desk except your books and a water you can't have snacks, they will break it into two two hour sessions and you can schedule when you want to do those two sessions so that you don't have to do two hours and then you will have a half hour break and then take the other two hours that you can schedule when you want to do each of these honestam institution, if your home is not conducive to the needs of that exam because you have kids running around or you have an elderly parent who has a very loud TV and you don't have an employer where you can borrow space or a library I would suggest also that maybe it's just managing a cheap hotel room for the day get into their free wi-fi with your laptop and your books many of them have desks you can use in the room and see if that might be more suitable for you if you can schedule it all in one day and do it in a hotel room where they can see that there is no one else there and you just spread your book on the desk or you may have a library meeting room that you can rent for
quite a low price because libraries are traditionally quite quiet, so if you don't have that favorable family environment and you're thinking that oh well I have to take it in person you know there might be alternatives like one library or how to rent a cheap hot el space now the next and i say it over and over and over and over and over and again practice makes perfect so if you are like oh i am about to take my cpc exam i dont know how do i review the practice practice practice if you have workbooks and textbooks that maybe and I see often your teacher may have assigned you only the odd questions and none of your peers are well answered what would be a great way to review your exam just to go through all those maybe questions about the case at the end or review the questions you didn't ask because they weren't actually assigned as part of your resume then go through all the materials you
didn't answer read your books again and that practice makes perfect then do practice exams i have a review on demand if you are interested in what it includes also some practical cases you can check my review on my website contemp ocoding.com or link it again in the description below or even better you may be able to find a local chapter that is hosting a free cpc review sometimes you can find chapters that have them for free because they have someone who is a great educator or is just a service they want to provide because they have material to host these reviews so you may be able to find a local chapter and it doesn't necessarily have to be the one you have been assigned you can look at other chapters and ask if they have the ability to participate too and see if they have any review materials or a review course on their zoom that they will have that you can attend now before I get into my final thoughts on the type of exam structure I want to go back to my thoughts on the exam in person so in person make sure that you pack your bags as a drink or a snack because the exam is shortened now you probably won't need to pack a whole lunch, so before when it was 5 hours and 40 minutes if you started at 8 you didn't finish before 140. noon you would probably be pretty hungry and you might have to
pack your bags like a sandwich or something, but now that we've shortened the exam you can probably make it without having to eat a whole meal but pack something that won't be really crunchy or noisy it won't you want to open a bag of doritos in the middle of the exam and because everyone will start staring at you like what the hell are you doing you have to tear the whole bag of doritos and plus you don't want to get the dorito cheese on all the exam stuff in the your books so put it like granola bars or protein bars also things like encrusted you can get one of those pb j uncrustables put it in your bag and when you get you will be hungry maybe around 10 or 11 pm if you start at 8 am, it will be thawed and ready for you to take it out of the freezer and then by then it is ready but you want to have something
on hand because you don't want a grumpy belly to distract you too. your big exam day for exams in person is not a bad idea to figure out where exactly you are going, so which routes are you taking which part of the facility you are about to enter and where you are going, so make sure you are prepared in advance not just setup your ways that morning and going oh my god i didn't realize there is some construction going on and it will take me 20 30 minutes longer because once they close those doors for exam that's how they don't let anyone else in once the exam doors have closed and started you can't be late for the exam so you need to make sure you are on time and finally make sure you review
the breakdown of the exam 'exam they give it to you directly on the aapc website so you know exactly what to focus on the type of questions they will ask there are six questions for each set of cpt so the 10 000 20 30 40 50 60 series and then em will have all six questions each for those sections four anesthesia six radiology six laboratory and pathway six medicine there will be four questions which are only medium term you will have four questions only anatomy five questions which will be icd-10-cm diagnosis questions three higgs picks questions there will be seven questions only on icd-10- cm guidelines there will be three compliance in regulation and that section of the case which could be anything from cpt could be and m could be surgeries could be medium term compliance those will test your knowledge in those 10 cases and actually those practice exams that are online are very similar to what's in the actual exam I've heard some students even though they recently said oh we haven't even
looked at the shit pictures in my class i'm not even sure i have a book they could go to their exam and not bring their hick picture book but there will be some questions about hick photos, especially about things like those jay drug codes you might see some of those on your cpc exam and you can't look them up in your cpt book because they're in your hicpix manual so really go through the aapc website look at the exam breakdown of how many questions and what kind of questions they will ask and also any
emails they send you related to your exam make sure you read through those as well especially for those online as they have some very strict requirements on what you need to make sure you have set up so that that online exam runs smoothly and make sure you get the right books as well because you can only take the ama version of the manu ale cpt but you can take any icd-10-cm version or heck pics you
want so if you like optum like aapc version you like bucks version of icd-10 or hickpix you can get you favorite version you want hope this video helped you in your certification journey if you want to see some tutorials here's how you break down the exam type questions info this is the playlist you want to check so I recommend, you found it very useful definitely let me know in the comments below, by the way, if you want one of these awesome t-shirts like me, you can check them in my merchandise shop, see you guys in the next video and until then just keep coding
