Free ACDIS CCDS Practice Exam with Questions & Answers | Set: 5

The overall response rate is excellent at 98%, but the fact that only 55% of queries are resolved before discharge indicates a meaningful concurrent-workflow issue.

Concurrent CDI is most effective when clarification occurs while the patient remains hospitalized and the physician has immediate access to the clinical context. Delayed responses can contribute to retrospective work, final-bill holds, coding delays, and administrative escalation.

The CDI manager should determine whether delays cluster by provider, specialty, query type, unit, day of week, discharge timing, or electronic-query process. Other factors may include insufficient notification, physician workflow, poor escalation protocols, or queries being issued too late in the stay.

CMI and MCC volume do not directly measure response timeliness and should not substitute for analysis of the actual operational problem.

Importantly, programs should not pressure physicians into rapid but clinically superficial responses. Query timing initiatives must preserve thoughtful provider judgment and compliant communication.

ACDIS identifies medical-record review, communication, query technique, and data-mining/reporting functions among core CCDS competencies.

CCDS Reference Topics: Query timeliness; concurrent CDI; physician engagement; workflow analysis; program metrics.

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Increased nursing care is specifically included in the UHDDS/ICD-10-CM definition of a clinically significant reportable secondary diagnosis. A secondary condition is reportable when it affects patient care by requiring clinical evaluation, therapeutic treatment, diagnostic procedures, an extended length of stay, or increased nursing care and/or monitoring.

This distinction prevents conditions that merely appear in the record but have no relevance to the current encounter from automatically becoming reportable secondary diagnoses. For example, a historical diagnosis that does not influence treatment, monitoring, evaluation, or length of stay generally should not be coded simply because it appears in a problem list.

Option A is imprecise. A secondary condition may extend the hospitalization, but it does not need to be the condition that originally “required hospital stay.” Option B is the opposite of the guideline criterion, which refers to extended, not decreased, length of stay. Option C is also insufficient by itself: provider documentation establishes diagnoses, but documentation alone does not necessarily make every historical or clinically irrelevant condition reportable.

CDI specialists must therefore evaluate both provider documentation and the clinical significance of secondary conditions.

CCDS Reference Topics: Reporting additional diagnoses; UHDDS; secondary diagnosis criteria; resource utilization.

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A high volume of unanswered queries most directly indicates inadequate provider engagement. This question is adapted from the current ACDIS Candidate Handbook's publicly released CCDS sample questions.

A provider may legitimately agree or disagree with a CDI query. Disagreement does not necessarily indicate poor engagement because the purpose of a query is clarification, not obtaining a predetermined diagnosis. A physician who reviews the clinical information and documents that the condition is ruled out, clinically undetermined, or otherwise different from the proposed possibilities is still participating appropriately.

Likewise, the number of queries generated is primarily a CDI workload or opportunity metric. It does not demonstrate whether physicians are responding.

A persistent nonresponse rate is more concerning because unanswered queries can delay final coding, create unresolved ambiguity, affect billing timeliness, reduce documentation completeness, and indicate weaknesses in provider communication or organizational query escalation procedures.

A CDI manager should not evaluate engagement from a single metric in isolation. Response time, response rate, education participation, documentation trends, service-line differences, and escalation frequency provide additional useful context.

CCDS Reference Topics: Physician engagement; query-response metrics; CDI analytics; program effectiveness.

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The appropriate action is to query the provider regarding the patient's nutritional diagnosis. The dietitian's assessment supplies important clinical evidence, but the associated diagnosis of malnutrition generally must be documented by an appropriate provider before the diagnosis code is assigned.

The FY 2026 ICD-10-CM Official Guidelines permit selected elements to come from non-provider clinicians—such as BMI, pressure-ulcer stage, coma scale, NIH Stroke Scale, certain social determinants, and other specifically identified exceptions. Malnutrition diagnosis itself is not simply assigned solely from a dietitian's diagnostic statement under this general rule.

Ignoring the dietitian's findings would also be inappropriate. CDI review should integrate multidisciplinary documentation because such documentation can reveal valid clarification opportunities. Severe weight loss, reduced intake, and documented muscle depletion provide a clinical basis for a neutral query.

The query should not state that severe malnutrition “must” be documented because it is an MCC. Instead, it should present the relevant nutrition findings and allow the provider to determine the diagnosis, including severe malnutrition, another level of malnutrition, another cause, or inability to determine.

CCDS Reference Topics: Malnutrition; multidisciplinary documentation; provider diagnosis requirements; clinical indicators.

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PACT stands for Post-Acute Care Transfer. The PACT policy is part of Medicare's IPPS transfer-payment framework and can modify the normal full MS-DRG payment when a qualifying inpatient stay ends with an early transfer or discharge to specified post-acute settings.

CMS applies transfer-payment methodology when applicable conditions are met, including circumstances involving selected discharges to skilled nursing facilities, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, long-term care hospitals, psychiatric facilities, and certain home-health arrangements. For home health, the timing and relationship of post-discharge care can be relevant.

The policy exists because a short acute-care hospitalization followed by transfer to another care setting may not involve the same hospital resource utilization as a conventional discharge completing the expected course of inpatient treatment. Accordingly, the transferring hospital may receive a calculated transfer payment rather than the unrestricted full MS-DRG amount.

For CDI professionals, PACT illustrates why accurate discharge disposition and documentation can affect reimbursement even when the principal diagnosis, procedures, CCs, and MCCs are correctly captured.

CCDS Reference Topics: IPPS; MS-DRG reimbursement; discharge disposition; transfer payment policy.

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