For many, outpatient CDI is still a new frontier. An outpatient CDI effort might be kicked off by success on the inpatient side and some preliminary wins with outpatient record reviews for ambulatory or emergency services. Programs with full-blown CDI efforts into system-owned physician...Read More »
“HCCs [Hierarchical Condition Categories] aren’t just an ambulatory focus. This is inpatient and ambulatory, so it’s really important for [CDI professionals] to be tuned into this model,” said Brett Senor, MD, physician associate for Enjoin CDI on ...Read More »
By Cathy Farraher, RN, BSN, MBA, CCCM, CCDS
At a recent meeting, my facility coders discussed that our special care nursery (SCN) patients were an outlier for length of stay (LOS). This surprised CDI staff—the reputation of the unit was very good, so how could it be an outlier?Read More »
Composing and documenting verbal query interactions often confuses CDI specialists. While the guidance published by ACDIS and AHIMA holds for all queries, written and unwritten alike, gauging a verbal query’s compliance can be a tricky business.Read More »
By Amy Sanderson, MD
The term “dysphagia” has many synonyms used by providers in medical documentation. However, not all of these symptoms are able to describe, with specificity, the real problem so it can be translated into its corresponding code assignment.Read More »
