Coding Certification Review Blitz Course Excerpt Part 1

Welcome to the Coding Certification Review Blitz. The reason I call it a “blitz” is because after two full days of this, you’re going to feel like you’re blitzed. Other people call them boot camps or whatever, but basically, it’s intensive. It’s two full days. In the past, have you talked to anybody who has attended this before? Okay, you’ve heard that sometimes you get out early on the second day. It’s not going to happen this time. I’ll tell you why.

The AAPC has really expanded the E/M questions on the CPC board exam. There are only 10 questions out of 150, but it takes a long time to explain it so that you can handle those 10 questions. Before, they used to make it a little less where you had to work to get the answer. Now, you got to work a little bit more.

Coding Certification Review Blitz Course Excerpt Part 1

So, I need to teach you more in that areas, so that’s going to take up that time, but I think it’s time well spent. I hope you agree. We are going to probably go to the full time both days, okay?

So, this is Day One, and looking at the schedule we’re going to cover introductory stuff. Honestly, I say the very first part, the first morning of these two days, if that’s all you got and you had to leave, you would probably have enough to pass the board exam.

It’s the test taking tips, because I’m sure all of you have already studied. At least you should have, because this is a review class. It’s not to teach everything about coding to pass the board exams. It’s to take knowledge you’ve already taken in, and really review it, and make sure you understand the key points that you’re going to be tested on. So, really pay attention this morning — that’s the key.

We’re going to cover HCPCS, it’s like 20 minutes tops. There’s only, I think five questions on HCPCS on the whole exam. Tomorrow, you do not need to bring your HCPCS Manual with you if you brought it today. If you don’t have it today, I won’t even panic about that because I think from the slides you’ll be able to see what you need to focus on for the exam. Then, we’re going to do ICD-9. They will not be testing on ICD-10 until 2014. We’ll go over that.

Again, there are only about ten questions on the board exam for ICD; however, ICD questions codes can show up in answers when they are testing you maybe on surgery coding principles. We’ll spend some time on that, but after today, you don’t need to bring your ICD Manual tomorrow. Okay?

We will go into modifiers after lunch, we’ll do E/M, and we’ll start getting into CPT Manual. Anesthesia, Radiology, Path and Lab, and we’ll try and get your Medicine. We might only get through halfway — we’ll see how it goes, okay?