Medical Coding Exam Questions on Disease

Описание: Q: What types of would there be on diseases, such as from mild to severe, or the location of an organ, or the description of a disease that the test taker needs to know the name?

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A: There is just like a talk the whole hour on this which nobody would let me do that, so I broke it down into some examples. The fact is we code for statistical purposes and people hear me say that all the time as it just happens to be a convenient way to get paid. Thus, like Jennifer has a lot of experience on the billing end. But the number one reason why do we code. For statistics. We translate the information into a code set so that we can capture the statistics. And everything that we are capturing is based on anatomy, the physiology – which to me I call the disease process. So you have to know the medical terminology and that means ultimately you have to know body systems and things like that. Everything’s based on a disease. But we divide that up into general coding, three code sets. Actually, there’s four code sets because we have ICD-10-CM, which does our diagnoses. We have CPT which does outpatient procedures. And then we have HCPCS which is for the Medicare patients. Then we have ICD-10-PCS, that is inpatient procedures for us to capture. But everything, even the procedures, you have to know the anatomy, physiology and medical terminology.

So, the question is what are they going to test you on? A little bit of everything. We’re not saying just one credential exam. Straight across the board with every credentialing exam that you’ll ever take in the medical field for coding you’re going to have one of any of these things that they’re going to test you on. But with the CPC exam through the AAPC, 8-10 questions on anatomy, 8-10 questions on terminology. So, there’s almost 20 questions right there that should be just given. You should be able to just go through those super quick. And that means you need to know the terminology and the prefixes and suffixes and stuff like that.

So I took three examples that I know as an instructor with coding that have guidelines around them that I know you’re going to be tested on. Usually, these are probably the top three that I see that people struggle with. One is septic infection, people get septicemia. There are lots of guidelines that follow that and the guidelines that we use as coders are not the same guidelines that are a standard of documentation or the disease process treatment that providers use. Our standards aren’t exactly the same.Then anemia. All you have to do is go to the index in your ICD manual and see how many pages of anemia there is. There’s a lot of diversity with anemia as well as the guidelines, based on the disease process, is for coding anemia. And cancer of course is one of the top ones that you’ll be tested on.

So I just kind of divided them up. If we take all of the body systems, you need to know all of the body systems. I’m always telling you need to know all the bones. Now, you need to know all of the little bones that are carpals and metacarpals, those individual little bones. No, you don’t have to know their names but you need to know where the carpals are and where the metacarpals are and how they are different than the metatarsals and tarsals and stuff like that. You need to know to name bones. You don’t have to know the names of all of the nerves but you have to be able to distinguish what’s part of the CNS and what’s part of the PNS. Don’t forget the lymphatic system and the purpose of the lymphatic system. Stuff like that. So, you just have to know them.

Now, let’s see why. Let’s take septic infection. One of the things that you’ll be required to do is when we’re working with any type of infection, whether it’s septic or not, we’re probably going to have two codes. One of the codes is going to say what’s wrong with the person. They have upper respiratory infection, then it’s going to tell you. Hey!