Member Insight: Courageous CDI innovation

by Jessica Risner, BSN, RN 

I became the CDI director for Banner Health in April 2019. Banner Health is a large health network covering six western states, with its headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona. The CDI department includes 80 team members who perform record reviews for 18 of the network’s 28 hospitals.

When I came on board as the director, one of my first projects was to analyze each of my direct reports’ roles and responsibilities. The four senior managers were taking on more and more duties at a system level that led to a reprioritizing of their daily tasks, leaving some items to be continually pushed back, half completed, or forgotten.

One item that was continually reprioritized was our computer-assisted coding (CAC) system. It was functional, as was our workflow, but new features and updates were not being used to their full potential. The primary issue was that there was no clear ownership of the CDI components within the CAC. No one knew who communicated with IT regarding updates, tested after those updates, studied updates and educated the department, pulled or developed reports—the list was endless.