CHA Healthcare Auditor

The CHA exam is delivered as multiple-choice questions covering the nine published domains. Confirm the current delivery method (test center or remote proctoring), question count, and time allowance with the certifying body, since it publishes the authoritative logistics on its website and these details can change between testing windows.

It is a professional-level exam, so expect applied reasoning rather than recall. Questions often describe a scenario and ask what the auditor should do next or which finding is most significant. Candidates with real audit or revenue cycle experience typically find it manageable; those without healthcare context should budget extra time for regulatory material.

Most credentialing bodies allow retakes after a waiting period and payment of a retake fee. The specific waiting period, number of attempts allowed, and fees are set by the certifying organization, so check its candidate handbook or website for the current retake policy before you schedule.

A common approach is eight to twelve weeks of part-time study, weighted toward the larger domains: compliance and regulatory environment, evidence and sampling, and revenue cycle and coding. If you are new to healthcare auditing, add several weeks for regulatory and coding fundamentals. Track your practice scores by domain rather than overall.

Start with professional standards and ethics, then audit planning and risk assessment, because later domains assume that vocabulary. Move to evidence and sampling, then revenue cycle and coding, clinical documentation, HIPAA, reporting and follow-up, and finish with fraud, waste, and abuse, which draws on everything before it.

Three recurring problems: confusing audit standards with healthcare regulations, weak grasp of sampling and evidence sufficiency, and shallow coding knowledge that makes billing scenarios hard to evaluate. A fourth is skimming reporting and follow-up questions, which are few in number but test judgment about communicating findings and verifying corrective action.

No, but you need working knowledge of coding and billing concepts: how codes are assigned, what documentation supports a claim, and what patterns suggest upcoding or unbundling. Revenue cycle and billing/coding compliance is one of the heaviest domains, so treat coding fundamentals as required study material.

Scoring methods and passing standards are set by the certifying organization, which publishes the current passing score and any scaled-score explanation in its candidate handbook. This page does not state a passing score because those figures are updated periodically; verify directly with the certifying body.

All of those details are published by the certifying organization on its official website and in its candidate handbook. Eligibility requirements, application steps, scheduling windows, and fees are updated there, so treat that site as the single authoritative source rather than third-party summaries.