The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is considered by many clinicians as the authoritative guide to the diagnosis and classification of mental disorders. Following more than a decade...Read More »
“Better, Smarter, Healthier” was the headline which topped a January announcement shifting value-based purchasing (VBP) goals and shortening implementation deadlines.
By 2016, 85% of all traditional Medicare payments will be tied to quality or value. By 2018, 90% of all payments will have...Read More »
When providers use different definitions for the same disease, confusion and chaos result. Inaccurate definitions allow Recovery Auditors (i.e., RACs) ample opportunities for denials, depriving your facility of valuable dollars/patient care resources....Read More »
It’s a question asked by many new to the CDI field: “What is CDI?” When I first interviewed for the CDI editor position at ACDIS, I quickly Googled the term, finding translations like “customer data integration” and “capacitor discharge ignition.” Clearly, I...Read More »
Some estimates put CDI programs in more than half of healthcare organizations in the United States today. As programs mature, however, the mechanics of daily record review and assessment have become just that: mechanical, leaving many...Read More »
Q: I recently took over a pre-existing, three-year-old program as its department manager and find myself in the unfavorable position of having to re-educate the CDI staff. It seems they were never trained on basic CDI principles such as querying for the etiology of the symptom(s...Read More »
Sheila Duhon, MBA, RN, CCDS, A-CCRN, is the national director clinical documentation improvement educator, performance management and innovation division for Tenet Healthcare Corporation. She’s been involved in CDI since 2006, and finding the position offered a career in which...Read More »
The AHA wrapped up its Coding Clinic for ICD-10-CM/PCS advice for 2014 by answering a lot of questions regarding the coding of surgical procedures/ interventions—a trend we’ve seen over the last several issues of the publication. Let’s take a look at...Read More »