Note from the Associate Editorial Director: Reflect on your labors this holiday weekend

By Melissa Varnavas

In the United States, we celebrate Labor Day as the official end of summer. We know it isn’t really the end of summer. Heck, here in New England, where ACDIS headquarters are located, it’s been muggy, 90-plus-degrees. Although the forecasters say the temperatures will likely drop to a more seasonal 80-ish for the long holiday weekend, September and October often come with heatwaves of their own.

While many of us will, however, mark summer’s demise with trips to the family camp or backyard cookouts complete with corn-on-the-cob and hockey-puck hamburgers, I encourage those in the CDI profession to take a minute and reflect on the underlying labor part of this national holiday.

Labor Day became an official national holiday in 1894 (thanks, Wikipedia) as a way to honor the American labor movement and the efforts of the working class in the country’s overall economic engine. We who work in CDI play an important role in our overall healthcare economy in the present day.

The CDI profession arose from a need to better capture documentation related to disease severity in the 2008 rollout of the Medicare Severity Diagnosis Related Group (MS-DRG) system which combines certain diagnoses into buckets according to similar resource consumption. Ensuring physicians captured the most specific documentation reflecting patients’ condition could help hospitals obtain the most accurate compensation for the care provided.

While this represents the foundation of CDI efforts, those who’ve worked in the field understand the changing dynamics not only of the healthcare reimbursement system but also the healthcare delivery system. Over time, that underlying mission has changed and CDI programs (and you, as CDI professionals) have pushed the boundaries further and further to greater and greater effect.

According to a 2016 Black Book Market Research report, some 90% of hospitals with “outsourced” CDI functions saw financial gains upwards of $1.5 million. Those who participated in the survey and report, some 85%, said they saw additional benefits in quality and case-mix reporting.

Capitalizing on those early achievements, however, means CDI programs now look much more holistically for improvement opportunities and touch an entire universe of potential outcomes—outcomes which have far reaching implications both economically as well as for the health of our country’s populace. 

So, before you step away from your desk this Friday (or Thursday if you’re lucky), before you hit send on that last query of the day, take a moment to step back and consider the broader scale of your own contributions. And then, of course, slather that butter and shake that salt on your next ear of corn and enjoy the long weekend.

Editor’s Note: The ACDIS team will principally be off celebrating the long holiday weekend Friday through Monday and will respond to inquiries as soon as possible. If you have immediate needs please contact our customer service department at customerservice@hcpro.com. Varnavas is the associate editorial director for ACDIS. Email her at mvarnavas@acdis.org.