Free Practice Questions for ACDIS CCDS Exam

The 38% post-discharge query rate represents the clearest workflow opportunity because a large proportion of clarification is occurring after the concurrent hospitalization period.

A 97% provider response rate reflects strong physician participation, while a 96% CDI/coder agreement rate indicates substantial alignment between concurrent CDI review and final coding. An 84% agreement rate is not inherently problematic because providers must remain free to disagree with a query based on their clinical judgment.

A high retrospective-query percentage can indicate that cases are being reviewed too late, that certain documentation opportunities are not recognized during hospitalization, that discharge documentation introduces unresolved diagnoses, or that staffing/workflow does not adequately prioritize cases before discharge.

A CDI manager should drill further into the metric by service line, query type, day of stay, weekday/weekend discharge, provider group, and reason for retrospective clarification. This analysis helps distinguish unavoidable retrospective queries from remediable process problems.

The objective is not to eliminate every post-discharge query. Some documentation issues become apparent only after final testing, pathology, procedures, or discharge summaries are completed.

CCDS Reference Topics: CDI program metrics; concurrent versus retrospective review; workflow analysis; performance improvement.

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Pressure-ulcer staging is one of the recognized circumstances in which ICD-10-CM permits the relevant clinical detail to be obtained from documentation by an appropriate non-provider clinician, such as a qualified wound-care nurse.

The provider establishes the medical diagnosis, while the wound-care clinician's specialized assessment may support the stage assignment. This distinction allows coding to reflect the expertise of clinicians who directly assess the wound without requiring physicians to duplicate every technical staging statement.

Option C is too broad. The exception permitting stage documentation from another clinician does not grant non-provider documentation unrestricted authority to establish all reportable medical diagnoses.

Pressure-ulcer stage is highly relevant because ICD-10-CM pressure-ulcer codes incorporate both anatomical site and stage. It can also have substantial implications for severity reporting, POA assessment, CMS HAC policy, nursing care, quality review, and risk adjustment.

When different clinicians document conflicting stages, clarification should be pursued rather than selecting the most severe value.

CCDS candidates should understand the distinction between provider-established diagnoses and specific coding elements that ICD-10-CM permits to originate from other qualified professionals.

CCDS Reference Topics: Pressure ulcers; wound staging; non-provider documentation; coding exceptions.

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The relevant Hospital Value-Based Purchasing domain is the Safety domain, corresponding most closely to option D. CMS's FY 2026 Hospital VBP program maintains a Safety domain that includes healthcare-associated infection performance measures, including C. difficile infection. CMS's current VBP Safety dataset specifically identifies C. difficile among its healthcare-associated infection measures.

It is important to distinguish the domain from an individual measure. “Hospital-acquired infection” describes the type of quality measure, but the formal broader scoring domain is Safety. PSI 90 is also associated with patient safety measurement, but it is not the name of the overall VBP domain.

From a CDI standpoint, documentation accuracy matters because coded and quality-reporting data can influence organizational performance assessment. However, documentation of C. difficile alone does not automatically establish that an infection qualifies as a hospital-onset event for every quality program. Timing and the applicable measure specifications determine whether an individual episode enters a particular healthcare-associated infection metric.

Therefore, CDI professionals should accurately capture the infection and its clinical circumstances without attempting to classify an event as hospital acquired solely to influence quality scores.

CCDS Reference Topics: Hospital VBP; Safety domain; healthcare-associated infections; C. difficile; quality reporting.

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The Hospital Readmissions Reduction Program (HRRP) reduces payments to applicable hospitals with excess readmissions for specified conditions and procedures. CMS calculates a payment adjustment factor ranging from 1.0 to 0.97, meaning the maximum reduction is 3%.

The adjustment applies to applicable Medicare fee-for-service base operating DRG payments rather than solely to the readmission cases themselves.

This differs from the HAC Reduction Program, which applies a 1% reduction to hospitals in the worst-performing quartile based on defined hospital-acquired-condition measures. Hospital Value-Based Purchasing uses another methodology in which 2% of participating hospitals' base operating DRG payments funds value-based incentive payments.

For CDI professionals, readmission programs demonstrate how clinical documentation can influence more than individual MS-DRG reimbursement. Accurate documentation of comorbidities, principal diagnoses, complications, discharge circumstances, and disease severity contributes to reliable risk-adjusted data.

However, CDI intervention must remain focused on clinical accuracy rather than attempting to alter readmission metrics through unsupported diagnoses.

CCDS Reference Topics: HRRP; readmissions; quality reimbursement; IPPS; risk adjustment.

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The Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program is designed as a budget-neutral program. CMS funds it by reducing participating hospitals' base operating DRG payments by 2% and redistributing the amount through value-based incentive payments based on program performance.

This mechanism is different from the HAC Reduction Program, which imposes a 1% reduction on applicable hospitals in the worst-performing quartile. The two programs should not be confused even though both connect hospital quality performance with Medicare reimbursement.

Hospital VBP performance encompasses multiple quality domains rather than simply determining whether individual HACs occurred. Documentation integrity is relevant because coded diagnoses and clinical information can contribute to risk adjustment and quality-measure calculations.

However, CDI professionals should not seek additional diagnoses merely to affect VBP performance. Their role is to ensure that documented and coded data accurately represent the patient's actual severity, comorbidities, treatments, and outcomes.

For FY 2026, CMS publishes actual Hospital VBP adjustment factors used for eligible discharges and includes those factors within its IPPS final-rule materials.

CCDS Reference Topics: Hospital VBP; IPPS; value-based reimbursement; quality measures; payment methodology.

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The phrase “post-op ileus” establishes that the ileus occurred after surgery, but it does not necessarily establish that the ileus represents a reportable surgical complication rather than an expected transient consequence of abdominal surgery. The relationship and clinical significance therefore require clarification.

ICD-10-CM guidance on complications of care states that not every condition occurring during or following surgery is automatically classified as a complication. Code assignment depends on provider documentation establishing the relationship between the condition and the care or procedure, and the documentation must support clinical significance. When that relationship is unclear, the provider should be queried.

Assigning a complication code immediately would therefore be premature. Likewise, simply coding postoperative ileus without resolving whether it represents expected postoperative physiology or a clinically significant complication could misrepresent the episode.

Escalation to a physician advisor or CDI manager is unnecessary as the first action because this is a standard documentation-clarification issue that can be addressed directly through a compliant provider query.

CCDS Reference Topics: Official Guidelines—complications of care; medical record documentation; compliant provider clarification.

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When sepsis due to a localized infection is responsible for the admission, the systemic infection is generally sequenced first, followed by the localized infection. If acute organ dysfunction is documented as associated with the sepsis, severe sepsis coding additionally requires the appropriate R65.2- code and code(s) for the acute organ dysfunction.

The severe-sepsis code itself is not sequenced as principal diagnosis. The underlying systemic infection precedes it. In this case, the patient's AKI has specifically been linked to sepsis, supporting the severe-sepsis framework.

Pneumonia remains important because it identifies the localized source of infection, but it does not generally precede the systemic infection when sepsis is present on admission and is responsible for the hospitalization.

The CDI specialist should verify that the documentation clearly establishes the relationship between the acute organ dysfunction and sepsis. Organ dysfunction occurring in a patient with sepsis is not automatically attributable to sepsis when another cause is documented or clinically plausible.

The FY 2026 ICD-10-CM Official Guidelines govern these sequencing principles.

CCDS Reference Topics: Sepsis; severe sepsis; principal diagnosis; acute organ dysfunction; sequencing.

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ICD-10-CM presumes a causal relationship between hypertension and qualifying heart disease, including heart failure, because the conditions are linked under “hypertension, with” in the Alphabetic Index. The presumed relationship applies unless the provider clearly documents that the heart disease is unrelated to hypertension.

Accordingly, hypertensive heart disease is coded using the appropriate I11.- category, with an additional I50.- code identifying the specific type and acuity of heart failure.

This convention differs from conditions for which ICD-10-CM does not provide a presumed causal link. In those circumstances, provider documentation must explicitly establish the relationship.

The CDI specialist therefore should not routinely query merely to obtain wording such as “hypertensive heart failure” when both hypertension and a qualifying heart-failure diagnosis are already documented and no statement says they are unrelated.

However, CDI may still need clarification when heart-failure type or acuity is incomplete, documentation is contradictory, or the physician expressly disputes a hypertensive relationship.

Recognizing these classification-based presumptions reduces unnecessary queries and supports accurate working-code and MS-DRG assignment.

CCDS Reference Topics: Hypertensive heart disease; heart failure; presumed relationships; coding conventions; query necessity.

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POA indicator U means that the documentation is insufficient to determine whether the condition was present on admission.

This is different from Y, which indicates that the condition was present when inpatient admission occurred, and N, which indicates that the condition was not present at admission. Indicator W is used when the provider is unable to clinically determine whether the condition was present at the time of inpatient admission.

The distinction between U and W is especially important. U reflects inadequacy of the documentation, whereas W reflects a clinical determination that the timing cannot be established despite appropriate evaluation.

CDI specialists should generally attempt to resolve unclear timing when clinically feasible before a case reaches final coding. Accurate POA assignment can influence CMS Hospital-Acquired Condition payment logic and quality measurement.

CMS publishes an annual list of diagnoses exempt from POA reporting and maintains the FY 2026 POA resources separately from the HAC code lists.

POA reporting focuses on the condition's status at inpatient admission, not merely when it was first documented or when diagnostic confirmation became available.

CCDS Reference Topics: POA indicators; U versus W; HACs; admission timing; inpatient reporting.

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