By Lori-Lynne A. Webb, CPC, CCS-P, CHDA, CDIP, COBGC
Back in 2016, I wrote the following synopsis for HCPro about outpatient/office diagnosis reporting, clarifying some of the misunderstood procedural guidelines between inpatient and outpatient services....Read More »
Suzanne Megown, RN, BSN, CCDS, CDIP, CCS, is a CDI specialist at St. Luke’s Hospital in Chesterfield, Missouri, and a member of the St. Louis ACDIS chapter, AHIMA, the Missouri component of AHIMA, and eHIMA. A CDI specialist for the past nine years, she worked in pain management...Read More »
FEATURES
7 The creepy-crawlies: Avoiding CDI scope creep
11 The buck stops here: CDI escalation policies
16 Tips from the frontlines for physician engagementRead More »
By Melissa Varnavas
There’s a photo of my mom and dad from the winter of 2015, snow piles towering over them on either side. That year the Boston area received blizzard after blizzard. We still call it (with a nod to J.K. Rowling) the winter-that-shall-not-be-named.
By Laurie L. Prescott, RN, MSN, CCDS, CDIP, CRC
One pitfall many CDI professionals face is one I faced myself in my early years. As a young CDI professional, I stressed to everyone, “I am not a coder.”
I still say that to people who ask me very specific questions related to...Read More »
Scope creep is “really the whole sentiment that since we’re already in the record, we can do more and more,” says Lara Faustino, RN, BSN, CCDS, a CDI specialist at Boston Medical Center. “It happened gradually for us.”
As CDI programs mature, they move away from the easy-...Read More »
“DRG validation can mean many things in many different arenas,” Autumn Reiter, RN, BSN, CCDS, CDIP, CCS, director of CDI staffing services at TrustHCS, said on the January 3 episode of ACDIS Radio, “New approaches in DRG validation.” “Essentially, it’s ensuring a correct final...Read More »
What’s a CDI specialist to do when queries go answered? What if a physician has a backlog of unanswered queries from three weeks prior? Or what if a physician patently refuses to answer queries and says “I don’t have time” or “it’s all about the money”?