Note from the ACDIS Director: Provider engagement series gathering steam

by Brian Murphy

The ACDIS Provider Engagement Series is chugging along with more great content. We hope you’ve been taking advantage of it right along, but in case you’ve missed what the ACDIS advisory board has been working on the past several months I thought I’d provide a recap here.

We kicked the series off back in January with our introductory paper, “Provider engagement and the ‘why.’ ” I recommend you start with this, as it lays out a nice case for why provider engagement is so critical to CDI success.

Most recently we published our second paper, “Defining and measuring an engaged provider base.” What metrics define an engaged provider base, and what does an engaged provider base actually look like? Find out the answers to those questions by clicking here.

We’ve supplemented these position papers with an ongoing series of case studies—actual models of engagement at the hospitals in which members of our ACDIS advisory board work. For example, check out this case study profiling the CDI programs at NYU Langone and Orlando Health, their hybrid onsite/remote staffing models, and the innovative ways they are engaging their organization's physicians in CDI.  

Included is a sidebar article on an interesting table build in NYU Langone's Epic EHR, which I will be featuring on an upcoming ACDIS Podcast. An interesting piece from that:

Recently, Christopher Petrilli, MD, SFHM, the clinical lead of value-based management for NYU Langone Health in Manhattan, made significant inroads by creating a table in Epic that auto-populates applicable documentation into every history and physical (H&P). The left side of the table pulls in historical trends of lab values and vital signs already in Epic, such as creatinine and glomerular filtration rate (GFR), while the right side of the table lists potential applicable diagnoses, such as CKD. Typically, the table will contain the last three to five values/vital signs, with dates of when they were performed/captured. The default setting for these diagnoses is “not present,” but the physician can scan the GFR ranges on the left side of the table for stages of CKD, for example, while deciding on an appropriate diagnostic choice. The table also provides a generic, modifiable plan of treatment that the physician can click and apply to the patient.

You can also find a second case study on two programs—Vidant Health and Essentia Health—that get great provider engagement out of deep, at the elbow work by their CDI professionals and physician advisors. An interesting takeaway from that case study:

Now that Essentia’s CDI program has physicians’ attention on documentation of comorbid conditions and the like, the specialists have moved on to other documentation projects, including building preference lists and smart phrases and reducing clicks in the EMR. CDI specialists have also partnered with nurses and providers on a systemwide sepsis core measures project, reviewing sepsis cases concurrently through the EHR. “There’s so much to do to help the providers beyond capturing the CCs and MCCs,” says Tracy Boldt, RN, BSN, CCDS, CCDS-O, CDIP, CDI manager. “It’s definitely a new way to look at CDI and how we can be a better partner to our providers.”

Prefer to listen to your education? We’ve got both case studies available to ACDIS members as recorded quarterly conference calls, here and here, (a CCDS CEU is available for each, too).

All of this rich information will be part of a panel session we plan to deliver at the 2020 ACDIS conference, May 5-8 at the Mirage in Las Vegas. This session encapsulates all our findings and research, including the results of a recently closed survey on CDI productivity and its relationship to provider engagement efforts.

In short, I hope you’ve found this series engaging (ahem) and I hope you’re ready to continue to the engagement at the nation’s only conference dedicated to the CDI profession.

Editor’s note: Murphy is the director of ACDIS. Contact him at bmurphy@acdis.org.