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

welcome back if you are planning on passing the CPC exam you know that practice makes perfect so today we're going to be getting in some practice we're going to go through 10 CPC exam prep questions hey there 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 today we're going to go over step bystep 10 mock CPC exam questions they are multiple choice and you might be thinking to yourself Victoria these actual questions from the exam no number one that would be unethical if I was sharing with you exact questions from the exam second I don't believe in the philosophy of sharing exam questions because the exam bank is hundreds if not I believe probably more like at least a thousand if not thousands of questions that they pull randomly for the electronic CPC exams so even if you had a list of likely questions there is only a fraction of a chance that those exact questions will appear on your CBC exam so it is very critical to learn more so Concepts and exam strategies versus memorization of test questions so in a moment I'm going to go through question one and I do want to remind you that you can change the speed of this video as well as pause so if I am going too fast or too slow for you you can change the speed of the video to accommodate your personal preference and while I provide these videos for free I would certainly appreciate a like or subscribe as patent so let's get into our first case study question I have got my CPT book all at the ready because that is going to be our first question is going to be based off of CPT now my book is tabbed you are allowed to for the CPC exam or any aapc exams tab your books they don't have to be as wonderful and coordinated as these but you cannot use Post-it notes with supplementary information as tabs they have to just be clearly there to just Mark your pages so question one is during an endoscopic examination a patient is found to have a laceration in the fings caused by accidental Trauma from a foreign object The Physician performs exploration which removes debris and sutures the wound to repair the injury which of the following CPT codes would be used we have option A 3010 b 42826 c 4290 and D 43220 now if we look in these answers I always say to kind of look at the answers first to make make sure that you're in the right area checking the right section that you're not all over the place that you're not trying to look for an icd10 CM code right we want to look at the question itself which is regarding CPT we are looking for CPT codes and we kind of want to look at these and determine like are these close enough together that maybe we just want to turn to the page that these are on for the purposes of the exam and determine what is the appropriate CPT code out of there or do we want to start in our index so for these some of them are further apart we have a 30,000 code the rest are 42,000 42,000 43,000 so it might not make sense to go right to looking up the codes that is a strategy you can use if you want to just look up 3010 and go oh is that right is this one right is this one right is this one right but for this one let's actually start in the index with CPT you are absolutely not required to start in the index it does not have the same lookup guidelines that ICB 10cm does where alphabet you have to start in the alphabetic index with CPT you can do more search and find so with this one we're going to kind of figure out what term to look for and what are they doing they are doing a suture it says they suture the wound to repair the injury I'm going to look up the term suture I think that's where I want to start although sometimes in medical coding there can be more than one way to skin a cat so if you start with something else but come up to the same answer hey there's no right or wrong way then so what are they suturing if we go back here we can see it's a laceration of the fairings so let's see if we have something for suture of fairings all right and right there it is we go to suture and over here we have fairings and we are very lucky in this case there is only one selection here which is fairings wound so depending on your speed philosophy on if you want to double check things you could for the purposes of the exam establish that you want to take that kind of a risk and just say hey clearly this is 42900 but if you feel more comfortable looking it up you can again this is just for ex exam purposes when we are coding in the real world we always double check but if you're like hey I'm more concerned about conserving time for the exam and then maybe if I have time at the end I'll go back and look over things that is a perfectly fine exam strategy so if we go in here 4290 suture fairings for wound or injury that is exactly what we did here so in this case the answer would be our C the 429 zero next question we have a 35-year-old patient who received a bone marrow transplant as part of treatment for leukemia they present with fever fatigue and a blood test indicating an immune response against the transplanted marrow The Physician concludes there's a rejection of the bone marrow transplant which of the following icd10 CM codes should be used to document this diagnosis we have t 86.0 t 86.01 t 86.02 and t86 03 so here's one where we're like hey um I think I might just be looking these codes up because look they're right next to each other we don't have to worry about possibly even flipping pages with these and again we're looking for an icd10 CM code and there is a rejection of the bone marrow transplant that's what we're coding we're not coding for this leukemia fever fatigue blood test blah blah blah there is a rejection of the bone marrow transplant that diagnosis is what we're trying to document and code for so which is the ic10 CM code for rejection of bone marrow transplant so we have to put our CPT book aside and we have to get out our ICD 10cm oh here is my beautiful tabbed icd10 CM book and we are looking up the t86 codes all right so these codes are way down here in the bottom of the book okay so we have complications of bone marrow transplant we have unspecified rejection failure infection or other now what did this documentation say it says we are coding for a rejection so if we look at that there in our icd10 CM book that means that we are coding for 01 now this is also the part of the video where I would like to also mention that the purpose of me sharing my books is so that you can follow along with your own books not that so that you can see every single detail of everything that's going on in the book just the watching of this video in and of itself is not going to help you with the CPC exam you really need to follow along and understand the concepts the lookup process and what the exam looks like when I organized these case studies I did as I created these scratch questions um I did attempt to format them more like the online exam looks now they're split more in half but I wanted to since I'm going to be sharing some things on lookup and also myself uh split it not quite in half and give more focus on the questions since they're a little bit longer and then have the answers on the side but you will have a split screen on the exam as well that's going to have like questions over here and then the answers over here and there are lots of functions on how to move around and Skip you do have to be comfortable with using the exam I think some of them are like in the top leftand corner and the icons AR aren't marked so it's not going to say hey if you want to skip this question click this button here you have to determine that level of comfort to go hey I'm going to see what this button does and then click and see if that's the one that will move you around or what have you I have people say sometimes like I didn't have the capacity to bring up notes or whatever in my exam it is there it's just that you might not be aware of where it is because it's not going to be a big button that says click here to open up uh where you can write some notes so when we look at this next question this is an anesthesia question so now we're flopping back to our CPT book 48-year-old patient requires surgery for a ruptured Achilles tendon which will be repaired with a grph the anesthesiologist the anesthesiologist is preparing to administer anesthesia specifically for this procedure which of the following anesthesia CBT codes is most appropriate for this surgery anesthesia isn't a huge section of CPT so this might be one where you just decide to look in your anesthesia section so anesthesia and we have 014 is our first one so here's 4 472 so it's not too far apart 522 and 01 630 so let's see here I'm going to kind of look through these and just kind of see if I can eliminate as I go down a through D so our first option would be 014 anesthesia for open or surgical arthroscopic procedures of KNE joint I don't know how I feel about that for Achilles tendon no no no um um next we have 472 which is anesthesia we got to get our full description in here anesthesia for procedures on nerves muscles tendons and it does say the Achilles tenden and fascia of lower leg ankle and foot and then the rest of our description for 472 would be repair ruptured Achilles tendon with or without graft and this says it was repaired with a graft so but we it would be the same code if it had a graft or did not have a graft because it says with or without graft 01472 is definitely sounding like the right answer let's take a quick look at the others and see if they look like maybe even they'd be possible answers uh this one says here Venus thrombectomy we didn't do anything like that no we weren't doing vein procedures 630 is Diagnostic and this definitely was not a diagnostic procedure so for this one it's going to to be our option C which is our 01472 okay so this one you're going to get some questions that are just Med term Anatomy maybe even some physiology so how do we tackle these like what resources can we use that we have within our books because that's all we're allowed to have we cannot bring a medical dictionary to the CPC exam like how do we determine these questions if we don't know this off the top of our head so this question is asking what is name of the thin membrane that lines the chambers of the heart and valves is it myocardium pericardium epicardium or endocardium now some people's strategy in regards to this is to just write all of the med term that they possibly can in the note section of their books that makes it a little bit hard to find I would say if you're going to write some Med term type notes to yourself do them near your anatomical illustrations for example if you want to write the blood flow of the heart do it near the illustration of where the heart is but for this question we're talking about the name of the thin membrane that lines the chambers of the heart and valves so here is our heart wall so here we can see from our illustration we have here the epicardium on the outside our pericardium and then we have this thick line of myocardium and then there is that what they refer to in thequestion as the thin membrane that lines the chambers of the heart wall right there that is our endocardium if you want to write specific definitions that you saw during your studies you can definitely do that I think near the illustrations I think that's just an easy place to remember where they all are so for this one the answer is D the endocardium all right next we're going to be doing one that looks like it is icd10 CM and CPT this is a skin question sorry you know they're my favorite question five patient receives a diagnosis of actinic keratosis affecting her chest and arms she visits her doctor's office to have these lesions treated using cryosurgery the doctor removes four lesions from the right arm four from the left forearm and four from the chest what CPT and icd1 CM codes should be used for these procedures so again we're looking for CPT and icd10 CM as a reminder you do not have the capacity to highlight or underline with in your exam what you can do though is bring up a little notes box you can detach it it looks like it's embedded in there but there is a little button that's on the box that will pop it up so you can kind of move it around as you need to on your screen so as you're taking your exam if you want to open up your notes box and kind of make yourself some notes it'll pop up and you can type things in to kind of keep track of what you're looking up or maybe what you're excluding doing there now if I got this question on the exam and I was tackling it I would start right there at 1700 it looks like 1 1703 is maybe an add-on code right you can kind of determine that and we're trying to figure out how many lesions we're taking off and what the codes are for those lesions now with lesions some of them are bilocation some of them are by depth and size and all kinds of things so this one it looks like we're removing using cryosurgery they're actinic keratoses which are a premalignant lesion and we have four from the arm four from the forearm and then four from the chest so four and four is eight plus another four is 12 right away I'm thinking B is probably not correct because that's a 19 of something so I'm just going to I'm not even going to worry about that one um this one's kind of funny with the three and then the four and then this one has 11 so it could be because this maybe is the first one and then there's 11 added on this one is just a one z0 with three so let let's take a look at this C and D have the same diagnosis so I'm actually going to start over here in my CPT book so here we go I'm going to zoom you guys in so here's these 170 and then 17 Z3 codes it is an add-on and let's go in real close so this was for 14 lesions they're in different locations but if we look at this what does this tell us it says actinic keratoses right and that's what we have uh these were removed during cryosurgery and that's what it says here it includes cryosurgery so destruction cryosurgery oses match match match and then we look here and we have first lesion so the first Legion 170 that's for our first Legion how many Legions did we take off now since we're not separating out by location we're just going to use the same code so 1 17 we took off 12 and then 1703 is our second through 14 lesions each and that each is a very key term in this and people get very confused about this so list separately in addition to a code for first leion so here's our first code and then here's our add-on code and how many times are we going to add this on well we're actually going to add it on 11 times because this is for 2 through 14th each it's not through two through 14 lesions it's for each leion from 2 through 14 the only time we would not build that is 1 1704 is when we're doing 15 or more so if we're doing 18 17 105 we would build just 170 four but if we're bilding from that sweet spot where we're doing somewhere between that 1 and 14 we're going to use 1 170 Z for the first one and then for each one after we're going to add on this add-on code up to 14 so when we go back to our case study here we had how many total we had four and four and four which totals 12 so we have our first code is the 17 that's for our first one of the 12 we have 11 more to go so we would use the 17 3 * 11 let's look at our answers do we have any that are 1 1703 * 11 yes we do we only have one so in this case we don't even really need to confirm our icd10 CM codes because we can tell just based off of the CPT that our answer is D 170000 1703 * 11 and then the l57.0 for the eant keratosis all right now back to CPT coding questions a patient with ovarian cancer undergos surgery The Physician performs a total abdominal hysterectomy bilateral salpingo ectomy and total ectomy meticulously removing all visible metastatic disease the procedure involves exposing the anterior uterine surface through an abdominal incision dissecting the bladder off the uterus and removing the uterus cervix ovaries tubes and momentum after ensuring no adherence to the rectum what is the CPT code reported for the surgical surfice so again let's take a look at what are we looking for here we're looking for a CPT code for a surgical service what is the surgical service it is a total abdominal hysterctomy bilateral salpingo ectomy and total ectomy and key thing here is it is an abdominal hysterectomy now we have a few things here that are kind of all over the place we a 58150 that seems to appear a couple of times we have a 58 956 we have a 5870 that's appeared a couple of times the 49255 appears a couple of times and then we have yeah so it's it looks like a mix of all the same codes what I think this question though is trying to test us on is maybe are we billing separately for the hysterectomy and then another code for the ectomy and then another code for the ectomy it are we billing out for dissection separately uh or is there a comprehensive code I think that's what this question is really trying to test us on from a concept perspective since this one's pretty intensive I'm actually going to start in our index with our hysterctomy codes okay so we have a lot of stuff going on here we did a hysterctomy salpingectomy and ectomy so here we have hysterctomy abdominal and then we have total total meaning we removed everything the tubes the ovaries with ectomy 5895 so 585 96 bilateral salpingo ectomy with total ectomy total abdominal hysterctomy for malignancy now this did say in here that the patient was seen for cancer and this appears to cover all of our bases it was abdominal hysterectomy bilateral cingo ectomy and and total ectomy if we were to look up some of these other codes it would basically be peacee different information it would be one code for his direct me and one for the removal of the ovaries Etc so when we look at this whole scene we can see that this is just one comprehensive code 58 956 so that's really what this question was kind of trying to quiz us on is do we know how to find the most comprehensive code that includes everything versus unbundling all of these procedures and building them separately which we're noted to do now for this question it states a surgeon performed an excision of a neoplasma from the lacal gland so not a skin neoplasm this is from the lacal gland through a frontal approach in a 45-year-old patient ensuring clean margins with the aid of separately reportable Frozen sections evaluated by pathology what are the appropriate CPT and icd10 CM codes to use for this procedure now the icd10 CM codes are kind of all over the place we have four different types of codes we have a c code a couple of dcodes they don't look super close I mean I would start this more so with I think the CPT section versus icd10 CM and I already have my CPT book out so it just I think makes more sense at this stage to look up the CPT and then you know if we need to Val validate the icd10 CM codes we will so what are we doing here we're doing an exision of a neoplasm from the lacrimal gland frontal approach and we have a couple options here 685 510 68530 68520 68540 wow those are pretty close together so guess what I'm going to do I'm going to go to the page where those codes are hey look at that it's a bunch of codes lacrimal system some of them say incision it looks like and then we're getting to excision so we're looking for an excision code and we're looking for an excision of a neoplasm from the lacal gland not completely removal of the lacrimal gland an excision of a neoplasm through frontal approach so our options that we have are basically 5 1 0 two 0 3 0 or 4 Z we didn't do a biopsy we didn't excise the sack we excised a lesion we have here removal of a foreign body I don't think that's what we did um and excision of a lacrimal gland tumor frontal approach that sounds more akin to what we did and we can even confirm here it was the frontal approach that was right there in the description of the question so in this case do we need to look up the icd10 CM codes no if you are paranoid and you want to invest that extra time in it just to make sure 100% that you're right uh you absolutely can do that but considering this isn't a um we don't have a pathology report on this one so it's probably an unspecified code what do we know about on specified codes a lot of the times they end in that nine right like a D4 9.8 89 right so that alone might help tip us off that this is the correct answer and that it is our option D which is our 68540 and D 49.89 next we have one that is kind of structured a little bit similar right 55-year-old patient undergoing treatment for breast cancer receives external beam radiation therapy targeted to a single area with the utilization of two simple blocks and an energy level of six me what CPT code best represents service so another CPT question again the the CPC exam is I think like 80% CPT questions and if we look here we can see that they're kind of grouped close together again 77402 407 412 and then 371 so again I'm just going to flip to write around where all these answers are so we have 402 407 412 and then that 371 is over here so we can look at just this open page right here and see all these answers but which one is the right answer so we have 402 and what are we looking for here we're looking for what let's see what do we think we have two simple blocks um we have level six of me I'm not even sure what that is but I feel like that looks like something important so those are kind of the things I'm going to focus on when we're looking at these potential answers so 402 radiation treatment delivery greater than or equal to 1 meev simple now this one the now the question said two simple blocks energy level of six M that's definitely greater than one this one says intermediate this says simple the other one said simple our question our question said simple it didn't say intermediate nothing intermediate nothing that feels like it's intermediate or complex and then if we want to confirm our definitions they're over here in CPT so simple is all of our creating um let's see one or two ports and two or fewer simple blocks and that's what we had we had two simple blocks so I think that's pretty much confirming for us that this 402 code is really what we're looking for we can look 77 371 if you want to we'll just take a quick look over there 371 radiation treatment doesn't even say anything about those Ms sorry I know that's a little out of focus but we're not spending too much time on that so in this case our answer is going to be 77402 we've got another hystero question in here and this one's for a hysteroscopy it looks like during a scheduled outpatient hysteroscopy procedure intended for the removal of fibroids the surgeon decides not to remove a small fibid deemed too risky to extract due to its proximity to the uterine wall procedure is otherwise comp completed without complications what CPT code is reported for the surgical service oh okay so this is interesting because if we look here look we have two options without a 52 modifier and we have two options with the 52 modifier what is our 52 modifier well we have two places to look this up one is in the in front flap of our book so 52 reduced service and then what does that mean our full modifier definitions are in our appendix a so if we look reduced service basically means we partially reduced or eliminated that procedure at the discretion of the physician or other qualified health care professional which to me sounds like it's what we did here so is it going to be a 58558 with the 52 or a 58555 with the 52 again when it comes to the exam it's all about saving time we're not going to do this in real world coding at our jobs because we're we're not going to be offered multiple Choice options so 58555 is a hysteroscopy that's just Diagnostic and that's a separate procedure rers are 558 hysteroscopy surgical with sampling of endometrium and polypectomy with or without DNC so in this case we were planning to remove fibroids which were on the endometrial wall but we determined it was too risky and opted not to which means that it would be more akin to to a 58558 so in that case our option would be our B 58558 with the 52 modifier last question here we're getting into evaluation and management everyone's favorite an established patient with a history of type two diabetes and hypertension returns for a followup visit the patient has been managing their diabetes with metformin and their hypertension with linil but reports recent changes challenges in the controlling their blood sugar and blood pressure levels during the exam provider reviews the patient's comprehensive medical history assesses their current condition through a detailed examination and decides to increase the dosage of metformin and amlodipin to better control the hypertension what CPT code best represents this service so we're determining is this an established patient level 2 three four or five often times most of these are threes or fours um statistically speaking but for the exam they could be anything so I don't think this is a level five where do we kind of go though to kind of get some definitions on our enm stuff now it used to be for the exam they would just give you the level of History exam medical decision making because that's what we used to score them on and you could just pick it out of that but now they're not so much spoon feeding it to you so for example if we go to our definition of our level four it tells us it's an office or other outpatient visit for the evalu ation and management of an established patient which requires a medically appropriate exam for history and moderate level of decision-making so how do we determine if this is moderate level decision- making well for the exam sometimes they will embed things like enm calculators I can't I can't confirm that they do for the CPC exam so let's just look at what we have available in our book so here is the information in the book about leveling enm Services now I'm not going to give you an entire overview of how to level an enm service because that should have been learned during your training I'm just going through now how to use that knowledge during the exam and use the resources that you have available during the exam so if we look here these are our levels of medical decision-making straightforward low moderate and high is on the other page I don't know why they didn't just put them like they do on the grid and just have you turn your book whatever this is what we've got so we need to figure out based off of the information that was given in this question um what level we're going to build so how many chronic conditions did this patient have what kind of uh risk are we doing were we doing I I like to always kind of default to a level four and then if it meets a level four great which is moderate um and if not I'll go okay if it didn't meet the level four um then we're going to have to go down to three did it meet a level three and then go down from there um or if it met the level four go okay great did they only meet a level four or did we maybe do more than than that and we could may maybe me a level five so in this case this is a patient they have type 2 diabetes they have hypertension and we're changing some medications so we've met uh two or is what not two or more self-limited or minor problems we have more than one stable chronic illness we actually these aren't really stable they're not at gold right um they're not acute on complicated injuries not an acute illness not an uncomplicated illness or injury okay so we have if we go down here we can see two or more stable chronic illnesses well it was at least that I wouldn't say that they were maybe stable um but we at the very least met this right and over here is our prescription drug management which we did manage the drugs we actually changed and added a drug so at the very least we met moderate let's go over and see if we met anything from the high category so we don't have chronic illnesses with severe exacerbations um we did not have a life to threat or life to bodily function um we didn't really go over a lot of tests studies we didn't talk to other providers in this case so not really a lot of complexity of data um we're not doing intensive monitoring with drug therapy we're not doing parental control substances we're not contemplating major surgery um so it doesn't look like we really met the high level but I do feel pretty comfortable that we met at that moderate level there's also some grids in the front of your book you can use if you find those helpful too so for here officer outpatient and we had established moderate is our 99214 so that's going to be our option C which is our 99214 so those are 10 questions similar to the ones that you may see on the CPC exam I hope you found this helpful if you would like me to cover other sort of specific questions on future videos definitely let me know in the comments below otherwise don't forget to like share and subscribe I will see you guys in the next video and until then just keep on coding on and good luck on your exam

Channel: Contempo Coding

Views: 27,203

Keywords: medical coding, medical billing, medical billing and coding, medical coder, aapc, cpc, cpc exam, medical coding certification, cpc exam tips, cpc exam questions, aapc exam, cpc exam prep, cpc exam tips and tricks, medical coding cpc certification, cpc exam questions and answers 2024, medical coding certification exam, learn medical coding online, cpc exam review 2024

Id: kPuoHgrYjOA

Length: 32min 10sec (1930 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 04 2024