On January 15, UnitedHealth Group Inc. and Mayo Clinic announced a new joint venture dubbed Optum Labs focused on joining data streams and handing them to researches to investigate how to improve healthcare and lower costs,...Read More »
The American Hospital Association (AHA) released two fact sheets this month highlighting the plight of inadequate hospital reimbursements by the government. In one, the AHA states that Medicare and Medicaid underpaid...Read More »
What is the goal of a CDI program? Most of the ones I see still focus on DRG optimization. We need to make the physicians allies of our CDI programs, and right now they are not. Instead, they are often targets of our queries. So how do you make the transition? By changing physician behavior one...Read More »
When Kari S. Ellis, RN, accepted a CDI position at the small, 100-bed Daviess Community Hospital in Washington, Ind., she had no documentation improvement experience. So when Ellis reached out, Terri Leap, RN, BSN, MBA, CDI specialist at Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis began to consider...Read More »
Q: I was under the impression that headings on a query form are leading. Can you help me with this? I would use a heading but replace the (example: Acute Renal Failure) with the physician’s wording (ex: Renal insufficiency). Then paint the clinical picture with appropriate choices.Read More »
On the surface, defining acute respiratory failure seems to be a relatively straightforward task. However, many providers find it difficult to arrive at this diagnosis without repeated queries from the CDI specialist. The discussion and examples that follow...Read More »
CDI initiatives often focus on inpatient documentation to ensure that the documentation accurately reflects patient severity. Capturing that documentation and specificity will be even more important as ICD-10 preparation and implementation efforts get underway. Yet ICD-10 implementation will...Read More »
