Free CPHIMS practice questions, with every option explained

10 exam-style questions from the site's free plan, open to everyone. Each has its own page with the answer and the full explanation: why the answer is right, why each of the other options is wrong, and the concept to remember.

Healthcare and Technology Environments

• Reducing 30-day readmissions A hospital's Medicare payments are reduced because its 30-day readmission rate for heart failure is higher than expected. The CMIO is asked which informatics initiative w...
• EMTALA and emergency department registration An emergency department is redesigning its electronic registration workflow. The revenue cycle team wants insurance eligibility confirmed before a patient is triaged and...
• Bandwidth versus latency A clinic 2,500 miles from the hospital's data center upgraded its network link from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, but a client-server application that sends many small requests bac...
• Types of backup: full, differential and incremental A hospital takes a full backup of a database every Sunday night and a differential backup on each of the other six nights. The database fails on Thursday morning. Which b...

Clinical Informatics

• Coded allergies are a condition for the alert to work A patient with a documented penicillin allergy received amoxicillin without any allergy alert. The allergy had been entered as free text in a comment field ("PCN - hives"...
• The alert threshold: balancing sensitivity and specificity A team raises the risk-score threshold at which a deterioration model sends alerts. Assuming nothing else changes, what is the MOST likely effect?

Management and Leadership

• Earned value management: SPI and CPI At a status review, a project has a planned value (PV) of $200,000, an earned value (EV) of $160,000, and an actual cost (AC) of $180,000. Which statement is correct?
• Sunk cost and opportunity cost A hospital has already spent $2 million over three years on a custom scheduling system that still does not work. A proven commercial product would cost $800,000 to implem...
• Incident management versus problem management in ITIL The EHR login screen froze for many users three times this week. Each time, the service desk restored service by restarting a server. Which ITIL process should now invest...
• Kotter’s model for leading change A CMIO is leading a system-wide change to a new clinical documentation approach. According to Kotter's eight-step model of change, what should come FIRST?

CPHIMS guide

Practice questions written for study; they are not the questions of the real exam. An independent site, not affiliated with or endorsed by HIMSS. CPHIMS® is a registered trademark of HIMSS.