The updated CPHRM exam for 2020 is now available. This certification demonstrates your knowledge and experience in risk management. Sherrill Peters, Senior Director of Risk Management for Community Health Systems, Inc., discusses the CPHRM exam and how to prepare.
CPHRM exam preparation resources may be found at https://www.ashrm.org/education/cphrm
Selected Podcast
CPHRM Exam - Updates and Resources
Featuring:
Sherrill holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree (BSN) from the University of Evansville, an Associate in Risk Management designation (ARM), a Certified Professional in Healthcare Risk Management (CPHRM), and is a Fellow of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (FASHRM). She has thirty years of healthcare risk management experience.
Sherrill served on Board of Directors for the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM) Directors 2014-2016 and 2002-2004. She is also the Past President the Tennessee Society for Healthcare Risk Management (TSHRM) and serves as ASHRM lead faculty for the CPHRM preparation course.
Sherrill Peters, BSN, CPHRM, ARM, FASHRM
Sherrill Peters is the Senior Director of Risk Management for Community Health Systems, Inc., a for-profit health care company located in Franklin TN with 102 affiliated hospitals in 18 states with approximately and 2000 employed physicians, where she has worked for 19 years. Sherrill’s primary responsibilities include: enterprise risk management support for CHS affiliated hospitals and employed physicians; underwriting the employed physicians medical malpractice insurance for Community Insurance Group (CIG); development and delivery of risk manager education; author of the annual premium credit program to rebate premium for risk reduction activities; analysis of claims data to drive the company risk management reduction programs; and management the company’s employment liability claims.Sherrill holds a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree (BSN) from the University of Evansville, an Associate in Risk Management designation (ARM), a Certified Professional in Healthcare Risk Management (CPHRM), and is a Fellow of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (FASHRM). She has thirty years of healthcare risk management experience.
Sherrill served on Board of Directors for the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management (ASHRM) Directors 2014-2016 and 2002-2004. She is also the Past President the Tennessee Society for Healthcare Risk Management (TSHRM) and serves as ASHRM lead faculty for the CPHRM preparation course.
Transcription:
Michael Carrese (Host): Welcome to the ASHRM podcast, made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ashram.org/membership to learn more and become an ASHRM member. So a new year has brought a new CPHRM exam with significant changes, including a new emphasis on Claims and Litigation. Here to fill you in on the changes and what resources are available to help you study for the exam is Sherrill Peters, Senior Director of Risk Management for Community Health Systems Incorporated, a for-profit healthcare company located in Franklin, Tennessee with 102 affiliated hospitals in 18 states. Sherrill is a Fellow of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management and serves as ASHRM’s lead faculty for the CPHRM prep course. Thanks for joining us today. We’ve got the right person for the job here today, that’s for sure.
Sherrill Peters, BSN, ARM, CPHRM, FASHRM (Guest): Well, thank you very much!
Michael: Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and what you do for Community Health Systems to get started?
Sherrill: I have been with Community Health Systems for about 18 years. I was with HCA prior to that for about the same amount of time. I’ve been in risk management for 30 years and I’ve been a nurse for 40. I am just really excited to provide for my company some risk management resources and education. I also do disclosure assistance with our facilities - helping them with patient safety initiatives that mitigate risks and claims.
Michael: So as mentioned you are a nurse and an ASHRM fellow, but you also have the credential that we’re talking about today, which is the CPHRM. Tell us why you think that’s an important credential to have.
Sherrill: I believe it’s important to have the credential because it’s the only one recognized. It proves to employers and potential employers that you have the requisite knowledge to perform the function as a Risk Manager. It isn’t expected, though, until you have the requisite amount of hours of on-the-job experience before you can sit down and take the exam. This is also important because as young risk managers, there is a learning curve. I don’t think of any exam is a really valid exam if there is not some experience first. Otherwise, it would all be just book knowledge and not really application to what we do on a day to day basis as risk managers.
Michael: Are there other eligibility requirements to take the test?
Sherrill: There’s an education and healthcare experience requirement, so it depends on what type of background education you have. The longest amount of time before you’re eligible if you only have a high school diploma or equivalent is 9 years of experience in a healthcare setting, versus having an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree. A bachelor’s requires 5 years of experience in a healthcare setting, and that’s just general healthcare - that’s not risk management experience. We’ve got risk management experience criteria also, which is 3,000 hours. That’s about 50% of full-time job duties in 3 years or full-time duties in a year and a half. A work year is 2,080 hours, so that’s 3 years part-time or about a year and a half of full-time work.
Michael: Do you have a general rule of thumb about when a good time is to take this - how far along in your career?
Sherrill: I believe that if people really start working towards it around year two, if they’re doing it full-time, then they’re ready to take it by about 2 and a half years. Like I said, you can take it at a year and a half, which makes you eligible. Of course the more experience you have, the more likely you are to pass the exam, in my opinion. But that’s really a self-determined requirement of yourself. If you think you’re knowledgeable and have enough experience at a year and a half, then I say take it at a year and a half. If you need a little bit more experience behind you, then that’s perfectly fine. I’ve had people who’ve had 25 years of risk management experience take the test for the first time.
Michael: Is this a pretty tough test?
Sherrill: It is tough. I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve taken the exam and they’ve said it’s about as tough as whatever boards, like nursing or whatever degree that they have. Because it’s not usually a younger person that’s in risk management. We’re all a little older. We’re just now starting to get risk managers interested in a younger age to start the profession. So, we have a little angst in test-taking and in test-taking on a computer. That was my first experience taking a test on a computer, and it was a bit daunting, I must admit.
Michael: So why don’t you talk about the exam a bit, because there is an application to this and you have to go to a center (usually an H&R Block or something similar), but you physically have to get yourself somewhere to take the test.
Sherrill: There is a list of centers on the AHA certification center webpage. You can get there through the ASHRM web page or you can go directly to AHA and search for the Certification Center, and you can pick risk management. It walks through how to apply to take the exam, and where those exam centers are that you can go to in order to take the exam online. It’s offered twice a day during most days of the year - I believe it’s at 9 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon. I like to tell people to choose their time based on what kind of person they are. I’m’ not a morning person so I picked a 1 pm. If I was a morning person, I would have picked 9. I also picked one that was on a Monday morning. That kind of hurt me, though, because you have a 72-hour window in which you can postpone the test if you get right up on it and are just not ready. You can postpone it for a short amount of time. But since I had a Monday morning, it really forced me to get up and get it done on Monday morning. Good or bad, I don’t really know what that was, but it was what it was. I had a little angst going in because of that. People tell me if they have to drive for a couple of hours, if they’re not near a large metropolitan center that gives the test, they prefer the 1 pm time to make sure they don’t run into traffic and miss their opportunity to take it. If you’re 15 minutes late, they won’t let you in.
Michael: Boy, this is sounding like the SATs
Sherrill: It does, it does. As you’re taking the exam, your picture’s there and they’ve got a camera on you to make sure you’re not cheating in that little room. Yeah, it really was like the SAT or my boards when I took those in nursing. But it’s a serious exam. They really want to make sure the right person is taking the exam, they are who they say they are, and that it’s your knowledge that they’re giving this credential. So it is very organized, I will say, for lack of a better word.
Michael: You’re listening to the ASHRM podcast, made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ashram.org/membership to learn more and become an ASHRM member. Our guest today is Sherrill Peters, Senior Director of Risk Management for Community Health Systems. She also serves as lead faculty for the CPHRM prep course, and that’s what we have been talking about today. We should shift now, Sherrill, to actually what’s covered on the test and note that there have been some changes that are in effect that just took place in 2020.
Sherrill: The changes really are in the 5 different categories that are on the test. We have Clinical and Patient Safety, Risk Financing, Legal and Regulatory, Healthcare Operations, and Claims and Litigation. That’s not changed from the old exams, but what has changed is the number of questions on the exam in those categories. Those are determined based on what we’ve turned in our job evaluations from ASHRM, looking to see how much of your job is in each of the areas. They reweighted the exam, and that’s what changed it in January. In Clinical and Patient Safety, which was 35 out of 100 questions; it went down to 25 questions. Risk Financing went up from 10 questions to 15 questions. Legal and Regulatory had 24, and it went down to 20 questions. Healthcare Operations stayed the same at 20 questions. Claims and Litigation made the biggest jump, from 5 to 20 questions on the new exam.
Michael: I think people have gotten the idea pretty well that it’s a difficult test, it’s comprehensive, and they’ve got the need to prepare for it. Can you talk a little about the resources that are available to help people get ready?
Sherrill: I can. We all study differently, we all prepare differently, so ASHRM really felt like we needed to give you lots of ways to prepare.
First, Risk Managers need to have the Fundamentals Handbook from ASHRM. They also need to have Playbooks. The Playbooks I would recommend are those that you feel you have the most deficit in knowledge. There’s one on risk financing, there’s one on claims and litigation, there’s one on obstetrical risk. We’ll continue to publish Playbooks, and that’s really how to apply the knowledge. I think both of those are really good study tools for us.
There’s also a preparation guide. We now have the 7th edition available through the AHA bookstore to purchase, and it was totally redone in January as well to correlate with the new test. It’s formatted very differently than in the past. Some of the past prep guides were in more of an outline fashion, and we did this year take the opportunity to put it in more of a narrative fashion. That was more probably one of my ideas, because if I look at an outline, I personally think, “oh yeah! I know that” because I see a trigger word. But if you really dive into some of these topics, you think “Oh, maybe I don’t know everything that I need to know in order to pass the exam.” So it really gives you some nuggets of information to help you prepare for the exam, and it will always tell you that in preparation for the exam you need to spend your time preparing where your weaknesses are. It helps you identify your weaknesses.
The other way we would like to offer you to help you prepare for the exam is for you to attend either an in-person preparation course offered in the academy in the spring, it’s offered at the Express that ASHRM puts on in the summer usually in Chicago, or offered in the annual conference. You’ll have two faculty members for two solid days going over all of these areas and giving you the information in which to help identify your weaknesses or strengths in order to prepare for the exam and get ready.
The other really new program is the online program. In the past, what you saw if you took the online course was just a reiteration of what you’d see in the live course. But ASHRM really took a big step forward and partnered with a professional educator company who went through education techniques you’ll see not slides like you used to see you’ll actually see different ways to go back and forth. There’s a toolbox with additional resources you can click on. We’ve come into the current century so I’m just really excited about that
Michael: That sounds wonderful. Are there other resources you’d like to point out?
Sherrill: I told you that I personally had a little bit of angst doing the online exam. If that’s who you are, there’s also one other resource that’s available to you, which I think is great. It’s the online self-assessment exam. It’s put on again by the certification center, so it’s either retired questions or it is questions that maybe didn’t quite make it to the exam. They’re really great questions. It will give you the ability to take that exam online to identify “Gee, I did really well,” or “I did poorly, and here are the areas that I did poorly in.” Just one other thing to help not only with the knowledge component but also with knowing whether you’re a good test taker on a computer.
Michael: Well, that is really quite a rich array of resources there. The fundamentals handbook, the playbooks, the in-person course, and the online assets. You can learn more about that and about the exam itself by going to www.ashrm.org/education/cphrm. I want to thank our guest for being with us today, Sherrill Peters, she is the Senior Director of Risk Management for Community Health Systems Inc in Franklin, TN. She is a fellow of the ASHRM and serves as the lead faculty for the prep course. You’ve been listening to the ASHRM podcast, made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ashram.org/membership to learn more and become an ASHRM member. Thanks for listening.
Michael Carrese (Host): Welcome to the ASHRM podcast, made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ashram.org/membership to learn more and become an ASHRM member. So a new year has brought a new CPHRM exam with significant changes, including a new emphasis on Claims and Litigation. Here to fill you in on the changes and what resources are available to help you study for the exam is Sherrill Peters, Senior Director of Risk Management for Community Health Systems Incorporated, a for-profit healthcare company located in Franklin, Tennessee with 102 affiliated hospitals in 18 states. Sherrill is a Fellow of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management and serves as ASHRM’s lead faculty for the CPHRM prep course. Thanks for joining us today. We’ve got the right person for the job here today, that’s for sure.
Sherrill Peters, BSN, ARM, CPHRM, FASHRM (Guest): Well, thank you very much!
Michael: Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and what you do for Community Health Systems to get started?
Sherrill: I have been with Community Health Systems for about 18 years. I was with HCA prior to that for about the same amount of time. I’ve been in risk management for 30 years and I’ve been a nurse for 40. I am just really excited to provide for my company some risk management resources and education. I also do disclosure assistance with our facilities - helping them with patient safety initiatives that mitigate risks and claims.
Michael: So as mentioned you are a nurse and an ASHRM fellow, but you also have the credential that we’re talking about today, which is the CPHRM. Tell us why you think that’s an important credential to have.
Sherrill: I believe it’s important to have the credential because it’s the only one recognized. It proves to employers and potential employers that you have the requisite knowledge to perform the function as a Risk Manager. It isn’t expected, though, until you have the requisite amount of hours of on-the-job experience before you can sit down and take the exam. This is also important because as young risk managers, there is a learning curve. I don’t think of any exam is a really valid exam if there is not some experience first. Otherwise, it would all be just book knowledge and not really application to what we do on a day to day basis as risk managers.
Michael: Are there other eligibility requirements to take the test?
Sherrill: There’s an education and healthcare experience requirement, so it depends on what type of background education you have. The longest amount of time before you’re eligible if you only have a high school diploma or equivalent is 9 years of experience in a healthcare setting, versus having an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree. A bachelor’s requires 5 years of experience in a healthcare setting, and that’s just general healthcare - that’s not risk management experience. We’ve got risk management experience criteria also, which is 3,000 hours. That’s about 50% of full-time job duties in 3 years or full-time duties in a year and a half. A work year is 2,080 hours, so that’s 3 years part-time or about a year and a half of full-time work.
Michael: Do you have a general rule of thumb about when a good time is to take this - how far along in your career?
Sherrill: I believe that if people really start working towards it around year two, if they’re doing it full-time, then they’re ready to take it by about 2 and a half years. Like I said, you can take it at a year and a half, which makes you eligible. Of course the more experience you have, the more likely you are to pass the exam, in my opinion. But that’s really a self-determined requirement of yourself. If you think you’re knowledgeable and have enough experience at a year and a half, then I say take it at a year and a half. If you need a little bit more experience behind you, then that’s perfectly fine. I’ve had people who’ve had 25 years of risk management experience take the test for the first time.
Michael: Is this a pretty tough test?
Sherrill: It is tough. I’ve talked to a lot of people who’ve taken the exam and they’ve said it’s about as tough as whatever boards, like nursing or whatever degree that they have. Because it’s not usually a younger person that’s in risk management. We’re all a little older. We’re just now starting to get risk managers interested in a younger age to start the profession. So, we have a little angst in test-taking and in test-taking on a computer. That was my first experience taking a test on a computer, and it was a bit daunting, I must admit.
Michael: So why don’t you talk about the exam a bit, because there is an application to this and you have to go to a center (usually an H&R Block or something similar), but you physically have to get yourself somewhere to take the test.
Sherrill: There is a list of centers on the AHA certification center webpage. You can get there through the ASHRM web page or you can go directly to AHA and search for the Certification Center, and you can pick risk management. It walks through how to apply to take the exam, and where those exam centers are that you can go to in order to take the exam online. It’s offered twice a day during most days of the year - I believe it’s at 9 in the morning and 1 in the afternoon. I like to tell people to choose their time based on what kind of person they are. I’m’ not a morning person so I picked a 1 pm. If I was a morning person, I would have picked 9. I also picked one that was on a Monday morning. That kind of hurt me, though, because you have a 72-hour window in which you can postpone the test if you get right up on it and are just not ready. You can postpone it for a short amount of time. But since I had a Monday morning, it really forced me to get up and get it done on Monday morning. Good or bad, I don’t really know what that was, but it was what it was. I had a little angst going in because of that. People tell me if they have to drive for a couple of hours, if they’re not near a large metropolitan center that gives the test, they prefer the 1 pm time to make sure they don’t run into traffic and miss their opportunity to take it. If you’re 15 minutes late, they won’t let you in.
Michael: Boy, this is sounding like the SATs
Sherrill: It does, it does. As you’re taking the exam, your picture’s there and they’ve got a camera on you to make sure you’re not cheating in that little room. Yeah, it really was like the SAT or my boards when I took those in nursing. But it’s a serious exam. They really want to make sure the right person is taking the exam, they are who they say they are, and that it’s your knowledge that they’re giving this credential. So it is very organized, I will say, for lack of a better word.
Michael: You’re listening to the ASHRM podcast, made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ashram.org/membership to learn more and become an ASHRM member. Our guest today is Sherrill Peters, Senior Director of Risk Management for Community Health Systems. She also serves as lead faculty for the CPHRM prep course, and that’s what we have been talking about today. We should shift now, Sherrill, to actually what’s covered on the test and note that there have been some changes that are in effect that just took place in 2020.
Sherrill: The changes really are in the 5 different categories that are on the test. We have Clinical and Patient Safety, Risk Financing, Legal and Regulatory, Healthcare Operations, and Claims and Litigation. That’s not changed from the old exams, but what has changed is the number of questions on the exam in those categories. Those are determined based on what we’ve turned in our job evaluations from ASHRM, looking to see how much of your job is in each of the areas. They reweighted the exam, and that’s what changed it in January. In Clinical and Patient Safety, which was 35 out of 100 questions; it went down to 25 questions. Risk Financing went up from 10 questions to 15 questions. Legal and Regulatory had 24, and it went down to 20 questions. Healthcare Operations stayed the same at 20 questions. Claims and Litigation made the biggest jump, from 5 to 20 questions on the new exam.
Michael: I think people have gotten the idea pretty well that it’s a difficult test, it’s comprehensive, and they’ve got the need to prepare for it. Can you talk a little about the resources that are available to help people get ready?
Sherrill: I can. We all study differently, we all prepare differently, so ASHRM really felt like we needed to give you lots of ways to prepare.
First, Risk Managers need to have the Fundamentals Handbook from ASHRM. They also need to have Playbooks. The Playbooks I would recommend are those that you feel you have the most deficit in knowledge. There’s one on risk financing, there’s one on claims and litigation, there’s one on obstetrical risk. We’ll continue to publish Playbooks, and that’s really how to apply the knowledge. I think both of those are really good study tools for us.
There’s also a preparation guide. We now have the 7th edition available through the AHA bookstore to purchase, and it was totally redone in January as well to correlate with the new test. It’s formatted very differently than in the past. Some of the past prep guides were in more of an outline fashion, and we did this year take the opportunity to put it in more of a narrative fashion. That was more probably one of my ideas, because if I look at an outline, I personally think, “oh yeah! I know that” because I see a trigger word. But if you really dive into some of these topics, you think “Oh, maybe I don’t know everything that I need to know in order to pass the exam.” So it really gives you some nuggets of information to help you prepare for the exam, and it will always tell you that in preparation for the exam you need to spend your time preparing where your weaknesses are. It helps you identify your weaknesses.
The other way we would like to offer you to help you prepare for the exam is for you to attend either an in-person preparation course offered in the academy in the spring, it’s offered at the Express that ASHRM puts on in the summer usually in Chicago, or offered in the annual conference. You’ll have two faculty members for two solid days going over all of these areas and giving you the information in which to help identify your weaknesses or strengths in order to prepare for the exam and get ready.
The other really new program is the online program. In the past, what you saw if you took the online course was just a reiteration of what you’d see in the live course. But ASHRM really took a big step forward and partnered with a professional educator company who went through education techniques you’ll see not slides like you used to see you’ll actually see different ways to go back and forth. There’s a toolbox with additional resources you can click on. We’ve come into the current century so I’m just really excited about that
Michael: That sounds wonderful. Are there other resources you’d like to point out?
Sherrill: I told you that I personally had a little bit of angst doing the online exam. If that’s who you are, there’s also one other resource that’s available to you, which I think is great. It’s the online self-assessment exam. It’s put on again by the certification center, so it’s either retired questions or it is questions that maybe didn’t quite make it to the exam. They’re really great questions. It will give you the ability to take that exam online to identify “Gee, I did really well,” or “I did poorly, and here are the areas that I did poorly in.” Just one other thing to help not only with the knowledge component but also with knowing whether you’re a good test taker on a computer.
Michael: Well, that is really quite a rich array of resources there. The fundamentals handbook, the playbooks, the in-person course, and the online assets. You can learn more about that and about the exam itself by going to www.ashrm.org/education/cphrm. I want to thank our guest for being with us today, Sherrill Peters, she is the Senior Director of Risk Management for Community Health Systems Inc in Franklin, TN. She is a fellow of the ASHRM and serves as the lead faculty for the prep course. You’ve been listening to the ASHRM podcast, made possible by the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management, to support efforts to advance safe and trusted healthcare through enterprise risk management. You can visit ashram.org/membership to learn more and become an ASHRM member. Thanks for listening.