Associate Director's Note: Celebrating Clinical Documentation Improvement

Check out this amazing Clinical Documentation Improvement Week video, created by the CDI team at Prince George’s Hospital/Dimensions Healthcare in Cheverly, Maryland, led by director Christine Mobley. In it, the door opens onto Mobley and introduces the CDI staff while later highlighting documentation improvement tips. The team also played a Jeopardy-style ICD-10 game with their internal residents at lunch, completed an ICD-10 word search, and will be holding a query mixer and Bingo game to close out the week.

And all this week, clinical documentation specialists around the country have been touting, extoling, celebrating their efforts and spreading the word about the various ways CDI specialists help their physicians, coders, and communities. We’ve heard from many of you.

We heard from Shawn MacPhee, Angela Maxfield, Claudine Hutchinson, Sheila Bullock, Lee Kinnaird, Toni Como, Letitia Rushin, and many others whose celebratory endeavors ranged from handing out candies to team breakfasts and from educational presentations to ICD-10 refreshers.

Susan Fantin, RN, BSN, MSA, CCDS, CDIP, senior director CDI and audit services at Anthelio Healthcare Solutions Inc., sent in a photo of her staff Beth Wolfram and Kathleen Sheehan next to this year’s ACDIS CDI Week poster “Branching out into Healthcare.”

Marshall Medical Center CDI staff Rebecca Hedgepeth, Toni Como, Maureen Dion Perry, and Val Eickhof took over a bulletin board to highlight ICD-10 and CDI focus areas with the theme “Fall in love with ICD-10.”

If you haven’t sent us your CDI Week stories and team photos yet, please do! (Just email them to Associate Director Melissa Varnavas.) We’ll compile your insight and share it with our larger community.

CDI Week provides a designated time for us to set aside and really spread the word about the benefits of documentation improvement but the tools and insight offered this week need not remain on a shelf until next September. Come back to the CDI Week pages throughout the year and keep the message alive—every CDI specialist makes a difference. And we are quite literally, “branching out.”