If you are feeling stressed because the medical coding certification exam is arriving closer and closer, you need to be aware of a few tips to help you prepare for the exam as well as study for it. Whether you are taking the exam by the AAPC or AHIMA, there are several steps you want to be aware of to better prepare yourself before it is too late. You may want to take a preparation course, collect practice exams, or use a study guide to help you review certain topics you may not have a complete understanding of at the moment.
Experience matters
Since part of the job responsibilities of a medical billing and coding specialist requires that you process patient treatment records, you need to make sure you have the medical terminology knowledge as well as anatomy knowledge before you begin to prepare for this certification exam. You may want to intern at a physician’s office while you are in school so you can have a better understanding of everything a medical billing and coding specialist does on an everyday basis. On the day of your exam, you want to have some knowledge as well as experience so you will not be concerned about the toughness of the questions.
Practice exams
By collecting several different practice exams, you will have a better understanding of the amount of difficulty the questions will be on the real CPC exam. You could either ask your school instructors for a practice exam or you can find a few different ones online that you can print out. By taking them online instead of printing them out, you will find out your score as soon as you take it and you will also see the problems you missed as well as why you missed them. It is better to collect as many as you can at least six months before you end up taking your actual exam so you can take your time and can go into a lot more detail about each question in case your CPC exam will ask you more questions about each one of the questions you answered on all of your practice exams.
Study guides
Having a study guide will help you prepare for the exam because it will help you study in a more organized fashion and will also prepare you for the exam by giving you a few sample questions within each topic. Your study guide may also give you an outline of each topic so you can refresh your memory in case you have forgotten, and it will also help you with the more difficult topics that you are not able to understand.
Keep calm and prepare thoroughly
By taking in all of these strategies to prepare for your CPC exam, you need to use those to help you study as well. If you are the kind of person that has high-test anxiety, then you want to take each topic and review a little bit each day. It helps if you could create a blank calendar and assign times as well as days of the week for each topic so you are not cramming everything in on the same day.
The more you prepare for the CPC exam given by the AAPC or AHIMA, the more confident you will feel as the exam day approaches. By developing study techniques that work for you, you will also feel less nervous and more relaxed as well as having the confidence in yourself that you can ace the exam and receive a great and high-paying job.
