Salary Survey provides insight into CDI program reporting structure

Most CDI programs have been around for seven or eight years, according to 20.7% of respondents to the 2015 CDI Salary Survey. Taken cumulatively, however, CDI programs are nearly evenly split, with 49% having seven years of experience or more and 51% having less than seven years.

Most CDI professionals have four years or less of experience (53.3%), and 71.4% have four years’ experience or less in their current position. Also, CDI professionals do not seem to move outside their facility—42.5% of respondents say they’ve been at their current facility for 11 years or longer.

Those with midlevel experience (one to five years) seem to have an opportunity to differentiate themselves by other means, such as certification or education, as the salary level seems evenly split at roughly 17% for each bracket from $60,000 to nearly $90,000.

Of course, those with the greatest number of years in their current position earn the top salary spot at 28%, but the responses to this year’s survey seem to show that even those with five years’ experience or less have an opportunity to earn an impressive salary: 16% reportedly earn $90,000–$99,999 as compared to just 11% of those with five to 11 years of experience earning that amount.

Most CDI programs are found in short-term acute care hospitals. Bed sizes spanned the spectrum—the plurality of respondents, however, work in large, 600-plus bed facilities. Most facilities employ 10 staff members or less, but facilities with more beds seem to have much wider ranges of staffing.

Lori J. Sackela, RN, CCM, CCDS, regional director of CDI at Mount Carmel Health System in Columbus, Ohio, has 25 staff members across her four-hospital system. Each roughly 200-bed facility has six staff members and a team leader. She reports to the finance department and thinks that is a good fit.

“They understand the implications of the program,” she says.

The increase in respondents reporting to a CDI manager/ director caught the attention of Deanne Wilk, RN, CCDS, CCS, CDI manager at Wellspan Good Samaritan Hospital in Lebanon, Pennsylvania.

“More and more CDI departments are moving out in their own rights, into their own departments,” she says.

“These results tell me that CDI is increasingly being identified as an independent profession, and equally important to the facility as case management, HIM, and quality, and as such, is deserving of its own department,” agrees ACDIS Advisory Board member Karen Newhouser, RN, CCDS, CDIP, CCS, CCM, director of education for MedPartners in Tampa, Florida.

Case management and quality departments reported to other departments once upon a time, Wilk explains, but as staff took on more duties, they branched out. For those programs that haven’t been around long enough to stand on their own, so to speak, “working under HIM is the best way to go,” she says.

Editor's Note: This article is an excerpt from the 2015 CDI Salary Survey published in the November/December edition of the CDI Journal.