How to Prepare for the COBGC Exam

Laureen: COBGC? That’s the OB/GYN one, right?                          

Chandra:  Yes, that’s the one I took by accident.    

Laureen:  That’s the one you accidentally took? [Laughs]                          

Chandra:  Don’t laugh at me; I know there are people out there laughing at me. Yes, you can accidentally take an exam [laughs]. I know there are people that don’t know the story that are like, “What are you talking about?” And I like Barb’s suggestion, Barb suggested for preparing for that is to pray a lot. The COGBC OB/GYN exam and how I accidentally took it. On the AAPC website when you are registering for a specialty exam, it used to be a drop-down box. I think somebody might have heard this story because now it’s different buttons that you click. But in that dropdown box, Hematology, Oncology, and OB aren’t that far apart, and somehow I thought I was registering for one and I registered for a different one. When everything came, like when they sent me the study guide that I ordered along with it, it was an OB/GYN one, and so I wound up taking the COGBC on OB/GYN, and anybody that knows me knows that my favorite phrase is, “I don’t know nothing about birth and babies, nor the right one to learn.” But it turns out I actually knew more about it than I thought I did.                                  

Laureen:  How to code it.                           

Chandra:  How to code it. Yes.    

Boyd:  Everybody wants to know if you passed. 

Chandra:  I did! I did [laughs]; by more than a little, too. I was pretty excited about that. And only on one attempt. I really didn’t study for it either, it was one of those, I scheduled it, I didn’t have time in my schedule to really study and it got closer, closer, and closer. I went, “Eh! I got a free retake anyway, I’ll go take it and see how I do.”

Laureen:  And you said a couple of the annotations from doing the BHAT® system…  

Chandra:  Absolutely! I took two specialty exams this year outside of the CDEO and I’m going to admit something that you don’t want to hear, Laureen, but I only applied the BHAT® technique to those sections of my CPT book. Like, I took cardiology and OB…                         

Laureen:  Selectively BHAT-ing? 

Chandra:  So, those are the only two that received the BHAT® information. They both helped me for taking those. But to answer the question about how to prepare for the OB exam; one is, do not think because you work in an OB practice day-in and day-out that this is going to be an easy exam. In my experience, there was a lot of information on there that my OB/GYNs in the groups that I worked with over the last few years don’t do anymore. They call somebody else in, whether it be a general surgeon, a urologist, a proctologist to deal with a lot of the bladder signs and the dropped bowels, things like that. Those are all included because for years they were things that OB/GYNs did. Not just the OB piece. OB is actually a very small portion of that exam. A lot of it hinges on GYN and GYN-related urologic and gastro issues. So, you really want to be prepared with that.

I would definitely encourage you to take practice exam through the AAPC, they offer practice exams for the specialties. You can get the specialty study guide. I didn’t find it as helpful for me personally. What I actually did, I got one of the practice exams, what actually got that I did was one of the practice exams and then the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG) has a great manual out there that is procedural coding for OB/GYN specialties, or something like that. I think if you’re in the club, in the free forum, I posted that a couple of days ago out there, you can find it on their website, just go look for a procedural coding on the ACOG website and it was a really helpful manual. It tells you what’s bundled in different codes and all of that because you do get one additional resource for that exam, and that helped me quite a bit to know what my NCCI Edits were and how things were grouped together.

This segment “How to Prepare for the COBGC Exam” originally aired on Live with Laureen #013 on January 5th, 2017.