While the majority of CDI programs report to the director of HIM, a good number (27%,according to the 2010 CDI Program Benchmarking Report) fall under the supervision of the director of case management (CM). CDI programs that report to CM face a number of challenges but may also take advantage...Read More »
By the time you’re reading this note, the first-ever Clinical Documentation Improvement Week will be in the record books. I hope you made the most of it.
Almost since the start of ACDIS back on October 1, 2007, our members have been asking (“clamoring” might be a better word) for a week...Read More »
Documentation of both malnutrition and body mass index (BMI) affects MS-DRGs’ assignment as CCs or MCCs and can clarify the patient’s SOI as well as the complexity of care required to treat him or her. Understanding the interrelationship between BMI and malnutrition as well as the clinical...Read More »
It did not take Bonnie I. Epps, MN, RN, manager of the CDI department at Emory Healthcare, Inc., in Atlanta,long to realize that staff physicians were not quite chomping at the bit to answer her team’s queries. To raise awareness, she quickly created a multifaceted educational approach and...Read More »
There are a number of ways to get CDI information into the hands of your facility’s physicians. The following list offers a number of suggestions on how to train and engage your medical staff.Read More »
Q: Some physicians are uncomfortable making addendums to the discharge summary to include the pathological findings (e.g., malignancy). Instead, they dictate a tumor board note to summarize the course of treatment and final pathological diagnosis. However, the tumor board note is usually dated...Read More »
by Jonathan Elion, MD, FACC Inappropriate use of baseline metrics may be inadvertent,but it can result in reports that show an inflated and unrealistic effect of the CDI program on overall facility performance. Furthermore, many CDI programs leave the data analysis to an outside...Read More »
