CPC Exam Practice 2024 - Walkthrough of Medical Coding Test Questions and Answers

a big part of being ready for the CPC exam is practice practice practice which is why I put together this video where we can go over some practice questions that will get you ready for the CPC exam if you're new here I'm Victoria I'm a medical coder auditor educator and content creator and on my channel I provide tips tricks and tutorials to help you be successful in a medical coding career if you haven't already highly encourage you to subscribe and hit that notification Bell so you can get alerts when I post new episodes now I want to go over some practice cases for the CPC exam I have 10 of them put together and nice variety Med term ICD 10cm CPT hipic even an enm in there but let's start out by going over some basics of the CPC exam so first off who is eligible to take the CPC exam there's no requirement for the CPC exam that you have to go through a certain program an approved program a college program an aapc approved instructor the two eligibility criteria for the CPC exam are that you have to be an active member of the AAP and you have to pay for the exam fee other than that it's really up to you how you want to train of course if you don't have any training you might not fair very well on the exam or if you don't have the correct training you might not Faire very well on the exam which is why I recommend programs like preppy you can find out more at my medical coding masterclass.com but as far as eligibility you don't need to prove that you took the prerequisites you just need to be a member and pay the exam fee you have two options of where to take the CPC exam you can take it at an exam Center or you can take it during a remote live Proctor which means you can take it from your home or at a hotel or a library but there are requirements there as far as privacy you can't have anyone else in the room you can't have pets moving in around the room it has to be nothing on the desk so definitely reference the aapc website for what those requirements are for the live remote Proctor one of the requirements is that you have to have an external webcam and stuff like that prior to 2024 the aapc inperson ex exams were administered via local chapters and they were on paper now the exams are all 100% electronic it's just that you can take them electronically at the exam Center or with the live remote Pro what is on the CPC exam there are currently 100 questions on the CPC exam of course that might change there's been some indications that at some point the aapc might consider adding in some fill in the blank questions I will definitely keep you posted on this channel when and if that happens currently it's 100 questions questions there are four questions on Anatomy three compliance and Regulatory seven on coding guidelines five icd10 cm questions three hips level two questions which honestly is why a lot of organizations and and educational places don't concentrate much on hipic because there's really only three questions on it on the exam and if you figured out icd10 cm and CPT hipic isn't that difficult afterwards there are six questions each for the 10 20 30 40 40 50 and 60,000 code series six on Radiology six on path and lab six medicine questions and six enm questions four on anesthesia and then 10 cases cases are basically an operative report or a long note and then they will ask you a question based off of that case certain other aapc exams they might have cases as well but they might ask you three or four questions or two questions on that case the CPC exam they have indicated that it is 10 cases one question each if you have the aapc curriculum and you have those practical application cases they're a lot like that for the aapc exam you'll need to bring a photo ID because they need to verify that the correct person is taking the exam could you imagine what kind of Racket they would have if they didn't check that I'm sure there would be people out there that would be like hey I'll take your exam for you just pay me x amount of dollar like they have to make sure that it's the right person you can bring any addition of the icd10 CM book that you want want you can bring your CPT book but only the AMA professional Edition and any edition of the hick piics book that you like now what about notes in your books I get a lot of questions about notes in your books and I always reference back to the APC they are the authoritative source of what is and is not permitted so if you ask Victoria hey I did this in my exam will they accept it I really can't tell you definitively I can give you the guidance though of what is on the aapc website handwritten notes are acceptable in the coding books only if they pertain to daily coding activities questions from the study guides practice exams or the exam itself are prohibited tabs may be inserted taped pasted glued or stapled in the manual so long as the obvious intent of the tab is to earmark a page with words or numbers not supplement information in the book that's why they often check for Post-it notes when they are flipping through your books because that's supplemental information in the book altering Whiting out painting or printing over any Pages within the code book such as the marketing Pages table of contents reference Pages Etc to supplement information is prohibited no materials other than the tab dividers may be inserted taped pasted glued or stapled in the manuals and there is the URL at the bottom for reference of that what years books should you use so since the code sets are based off of the calendar years books you really should have the calendar year books the a APC strongly suggests you use the current Year's books the exams are updated in January it says here previous calendar years books may be used on the exam but you would be at a disadvantage doing so now people will ask me well uh it's 2024 I have the books from 2022 is that going to be permitted I want to highlight for you that this says year singular apostrophe s possessive so that means one year if it was multiple calendar years it would be S and then the apostrophe so my thought is they mean one prior calendar year not multiple years prior is it possible that your Proctor isn't going to care and they might just Shuffle you through and not pay attention to what year the book is it's entirely possible you're also not permitted to use the upcoming Year's books books older than one year are not allowed for exam use just kind of reiterating that here it is in there again I'm sure people have slid by with older books than that but the official guidance is current calendar year or one calendar year prior examinees using their second attempt in the next calendar year will not be permitted to take the previous year's exam so if you're taking your exam for example in December of 2024 and you do not pass and then you want to retake in January of 2025 you can't take the 2024 version you have to take the 2025 version of the exam now let's just get into some questions for the exam starting out with some Med term what is the primary function of the alvioli in the human respiratory system is it a to transport oxygen from atmosphere to the blood B to produce mucus to trap forign particles C to facilitate the exchange of gases between the air and blood or D to regulate the flow of air in the lungs now with these type of questions sometimes your Anatomy pictures can be helpful if this is something that you want to write notes on I would say go to your Anatomy photos of the lungs your illustrations and write some notes in there about the functions of the respiratory system in this case it is C to facilitate the exchange of gases between the air and blood now let's get into some IC d10cm questions a 50-year-old patient has been diagnosed with elevated blood pressure but does not have a history of hypertension what is the correct icd10 CM code for this condition now it's important to note that we have diagnoses for hypertension but in order to designate the hypertension code we have to have physician documentation specifically saying this patient has hypertension not just an isolated elevated blood pressure read so what do we do in these situations this is a common question that comes up during the exam and during the study material so you might wind up seeing something very similar to this on your exam we have r 3.0 and if we see our I codes there we know I 10 that's one of the first codes we learn I 10 is hypertension so this patient doesn't have hypertension we can maybe process of elimination this right so if I see all these I codes and I'm like oh my gosh I know that I 10 is a hypertension and I13 as a hypertension code and I15 as a hypertension code our codes those are like our sign symptom stuff right so we could possibly use the process of elimination here and go oh yeah ro3 but what would that look like if we look it up in our book so for this one we're going to start with our e for elevated we going to go over to our e l elevated and if we see down here elevated blood pressure reading incidental isolated no diagnosis of hypertension r3.0 so for this case r3.0 is our correct code for the elevated blood pressure next case we have a 43-year-old patient diagnosed with idiopathic gastroparesis which icd10 CM code should be used to accurately represent this diagnosis we have options of K 3184 k318 9 K3 1.9 and K 59.0 so what I would suggest we do is maybe look at these k31 codes and start right there and see if we can really quickly just on that one page maybe where the K3 1s are find that code and see see if we can easily determine what the correct answer is there by the way if you like these tabs that I have in my book they are from medical coding tabs Co I will link them below because I know I do get a lot of questions about where I get them so the potential codes we're looking at is K 3184 89 or 9 or this K 59.0 so if none of those fit we'll go and check K 59.0 but here we are K 51.8 is over here k 51.8 four is gastroparesis 89 is other diseases K3 1.9 itself is diseases of stomach and dadum but I'm really liking this k31.84 which is our code for gastroparesis now you could look this up in the alphabetic index you could start with gastroparesis and that will take you to k31.84 and there's no further specificity of the gastroparesis there so if we look at this our correct answer is the k31.84 getting a little further in depth with icd10 CM we have a 55-year-old patient receiving ongoing chemotherapy for primary malignant neoplasm of the liver which set of icd10 CM codes would best capture the scenario now when we look at this there's a couple of things we can note here right we have some C codes for cancer and then we have some zodes here right and there's some sequencing differences one of them has the cancer code first and then the other has this zcode second we have the z11 z51.11 repeated here a couple of times here here and here we have a z 51.2 so if that's z51.11 we can eliminate a we could eliminate some things based off of some sequencing guidelines so when I look at this I'm thinking okay chemotherapy and cancer I know there is a guideline regarding this and the sequencing so that might be one of your Best Bets let's take a look at that guideline actually if we look at our neoplasm guidelines it says that the patient admission or encounter is chiefly for the admission of chemotherapy immunotherapy and radiation therapy it says here z51.11 is the encounter for anti-neoplastic chemo theapy and that that would be the first listed or principal diagnosis so just based off of that alone we can eliminate our option b and we can eliminate our option A because those this one doesn't have the right sequencing it put the cancer code first and it says that the chemotherapy has to go first and this one the Z 51.2 isn't the right code for chemotherapy so now we're going to have to determine is this C 22.8 or C2 2.9 and we can do that with a quick look up in our book so here are our c22 codes we have c228 and .9 this is primary neoplasm of the liver this one is malignant neoplasm of liver not specified as primary or secondary and if we look back on our case it does in fact specify that this was primary primary malignancy so we're going to use our C 22.8 so this would be our option C the z51.11 and c22 .8 now let's get into some questions on CPT A 42-year-old male patient undergo surgical repair of a 4 cm incarcerated umbilical hernia which CPT code should be used for this procedure we have 49505 49594 49593 495 85 now again this is one that we could potentially use the process of elimination for it looks like the codes are closed together we could just go ahead and look up the codes it let for this one let's actually start in the index sometimes people want to know what it looks like when we check the index first however if it was me personally I would probably start going over to those 4959 codes and kind of start around there so of course with CPT our index is in the back and we're going to start with r for repair but's see what happens is if we go here to repair abdomen hernia it's going to give us these whole code ranges which are basically our code options so not super helpful in this instance sometimes it is but in this one it really wasn't we could also check hernia repair now that might give us some better information here this one was an umbilical hernia so umbilical this was not listed as recurrent so it would be an initial and here's the code range that it's giving us 495 91 49596 which which means it's probably our B or C options which I was going to start looking at those anyway so it starts here repair the anterior abdominal hernas such as umbilical and then they break down by size so this particular one was 4 cm incarcerated so here we have 3 to 10 reducible 3 to 10 which is where four Falls in incarcerated or strangulated 49594 so in this case our answer is going to be our 49594 for the 4 cm incarcerated umbilical hernia now we're going to get into an enm question I'll read this through for you subjective 50-year-old female established to this office reports a persistent cough and mild chest discomfort over the past two weeks she denies fever but mentions occasional shortness of breath during physical activity objective vital signs are stable physical examination reveals mild wheezing in the lower loes bilaterally no signs of respiratory distress are present assessment bronchitis plan prescribe a course of amoxicilin 500 milligrams and accommodate rest fluids and follow-up visit for one week patient education was provided about monitoring symptoms and when to see further medical care which CPT code best represents the level of service for this encounter now if we were going to start in our code book and just look up these codes with enm that's not as helpful because it just tells you this one is a low risk this one is a moderate risk now with the electronic exams there is going to be some enm calculators that are embedded in the exam they are the aapc version of them so it's not like you're going to have the AMA spreadsheet that you can pop up but the enm information is in your book so starting on page nine is the medical decision-making table it doesn't look like the sheet that you have I don't know why they didn't just turn it sideways and put it in there they had to put it on I think it's two pages three pages two pages so if we look at this case here a couple of things I want to note was this patient had prescription drug management amoxicillin but this was a pretty straightforward problem so normally when we think prescription drug management we're like oh man that's moderate that's going to be like a level four but we didn't have one or more chronic illnesses we didn't have two or more stable chronic illnesses this isn't an undiagnosed new problem with an uncertain prognosis there was no systemic symptoms it was just bronchitis and it wasn't complicated so really as far as the number and complexity of problems addressed it's falling more here on low where it is an acute uncomplicated illness so even though we hit that prescription drug management here we have to at least meet or exceed here we did exceed in the low category we have two of the three that we need so this is a low medical decision-making problem where does that place us for our enm level as far as our two out of the three elements of medical decision making if we look at the grid that's in our book here we have our office outpatient visits established so our low medical decisionmaking will put us here at the 99213 so for this case it is option b the 99213 let's get into an anesthesia question what is the appropriate CPT code for anesthesia provided during a total knee arthroplasty so how do we look this one up I am not the best person with anesthesia I also love just going right to the book so I'm seeing that there's two codes here that are close together 01400 and 0142 so I'm just going to flip over to those pages here's my Anastasia and I'm going to start over with 014 so this is for a total knee arthro plasty and we are here in the ne and poal area and our 4 anesthesia for open or surgical arthoscopic procedures of the knee joint not otherwise specified and if we look right here here's our total knee arthroplasty 0142 which is what this was this was a total knee arthroplasty now the other options we have were 80 80 we can see is here under the lower leg so below the knee so that wouldn't be right 382 is for Diagnostic so that wasn't right either cuz this was a total knee arthroplasty so the correct answer for this case for the total knee arthroplasty anesthesia would be 0142 now let's combine some CPT and ICD 10cm so even though on the CPC exam it says there's going to be so many questions about CBT and so many questions about icd10 CM you will see some combined questions where they're going to ask you about CPT and ICD 10cm on the same question this might even be a fair one for saying a case the case might be a little bit longer but this is a fair assessment of it 58-year-old patient presents to the emergency department after slipping on ice and sustaining an injury to the right ankle radiographic Imaging confirms an acute closed balol ankle fracture the orthopedic surgeon performs an open reduction and internal fixation of the Bal olar ankle fracture what are the appropriate CPT and icd10 CM codes for this patient's surgical procedure and diagnosis so what are we coding for here here we're coding for an open reduction internal fixation of this bolar ankle fracture that's going to be our procedure and the ankle fracture is also going to be our diagnosis code so we're going to code for this oif open reduction internal fixation of the B ankle fracture again I think because these codes are so close together process of elimination I'm just going to look them up in the code book first so options A and B are both both 27814 so I have a good feeling about that one because they're using it twice our other options are 808 and 822 but if we look right over here the open treatment of the balol ankle fracture and it says includes internal fixation when performed so open reduction internal fixation that sounds like it's the right thing so let's check the other ones so 808 is closed treatment and that's not what we did we did an open treatment and 822 is open treatment of a trial angle fracture and that's not what we did so we can eliminate our couple options here we know it's either going to be a and b so we can eliminate some of our other options we know it's not going to be C we know it's not going to be D so it's going to be either our option A or B so we're going to narrow it down to looking at is this s82 84 41 or 844 so let's bring back out our IC d1m book so the difference here is going to be this is our displaced of the right lower leg this is non-displaced of the bellular FL fracture of the right lower leg now if the documentation doesn't specify if it's displaced or non-displaced we have to know our guidelines here or go back and reference them the default would be displaced so in this case it would be our option A so CPT code 27814 and the s828 41 A initial encounter for the displaced B mular angle fracture here we have another cptn icd10 CM example 65-year-old patient presents with severe lower back pain and radiating leg pain Diagnostic Imaging reveals grade 2 spondo iasis at The L4 L5 level with significant nerve root compression patient under go a laminectomy with removal of abnormal facets and pars articularis with decompression of the cot eona and the nerve Roots Gill type procedure at The L4 L5 level what are the appropriate CPD and icd10 CM codes for this patient's surgical procedure and diagnosis now we can see we can eliminate half of them if we can figure out if this is M 43.1 7 or M 3416 I already have my icd10 CM book out because I just was using it for the previous case so I'm going to start there and determine that so what is our diagnosis here it's not the lower back pain it's not the radiating leg pain those are the signs and symptoms which we don't code when we have a definitive diagnosis so this is the grade 2 spondias at The L4 L5 so if we look here m431 16 is for the lumbar region7 is lumbo Sac L4 L5 is lumbar L for lumbar it's not down into our lumbo sacral just yet so this would be the six meaning we can eliminate our answers A and B so we can eliminate our options A and B because we know it's not lumbo sacral it's just lumbar now what is our procedure in this case our procedure is going to be the laminectomy with the removal of the abnormal facets and the decompression so that's the code we're going to look for is it going to be this L is it going to be 63047 or 63012 so let's flip over to our CBT book so 63012 is laminectomy with removal of normal facets and or pars inter articularis with decompression of qua equina and nerve roots for spond aasis lumbar Gill type procedure which sounds pretty good but let's just double check what that 63047 is yeah 63047 doesn't look like it's what we are looking for lumbar it's in the right region but in this case definitely is going to be our 63012 and our m43.16 are option D now let's take a look at a hicki question this is a patient they have postsurgical nausea and vomiting and they are administered 4 milligrams of IV Zofran what is the appropriate hipi code for this medication now with drug codes those are RJ codes and we have to pay really close attention to the dosage and make sure that we're billing the right units based off of the dosage and of course now reporting things like drug waste so when we look at this one we can see j2405 is repeated three times so chances are good that they're trying to test us on that code and they want us to know dosage appropriately so you can use your table in your hipic book If you're looking up drug codes there is a drug table but in this case for the exam I'm going to say let's just go over to our j2405 and take a look so here is our j2405 injection and it says here permon 1 mgram and it is Zofran lists the drug name down here so this patient had four milligrams which means this is built per 1 milligram we're going to build four units of j2405 we can tell this is the correct one the other one was j94 which doesn't even sound like it's in the right area so four units of that one is going to take us to our j2405 * 4 and those are our cases for practice for the CPC exam if you have specific other types of cases you would love for me to cover definitely let me know in the comments below otherwise if you need more practice you can check out my CPC review that I have for sale it is not the same as anything else that I have on YouTube and I also have a full review playlist that you can check out right over here otherwise I will see you guys in the next video and until then just keep on coding on

Channel: Contempo Coding

Views: 39,075

Keywords: medical coding, medical billing, medical billing and coding, medical coder, aapc, cpc, cpc exam, CPC Exam Prep, Medical Coding, CPC Certification, 2024 CPC Exam, Medical Coder Training, AAPC Exam, CPC Exam Questions, Medical Coding Practice, CPC Exam Tips, CPC Study Guide, Medical Auditor, Medical Coding Educator, CPC Exam Practice, Medical Coding for Beginners, Healthcare Coding, CPC Review, CPC Exam Format, Medical Coding Guidelines, Medical Coding Certification

Id: 5crQ8lEASns

Length: 27min 24sec (1644 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 18 2024