I am supervisor of a documentation integrity program at a leading teaching hospital in South Carolina. Our program has been in existence for seven years. I want to reply to the article in the September 2011 edition of Today’s Hospitalist ...Read More »
I realize that many of the faithful members of ACDIS are, indeed, coders, but most of us have a nursing background, so I’m going to give my two-cents on the coding/CDI specialist relationships from a nursing perspective and hope that...Read More »
I almost didn’t become a nurse. I was almost booted out of nursing school. For alleged transgressions too ridiculous to describe, a petty instructor failed me in my pediatrics clinical. While the director basically conceded that the...Read More »
While the majority of CDI programs report to the director of HIM, a good number (27%, according to the 2010 CDI Program Benchmarking Report) fall under the supervision of the director of case management (CM). CDI programs that report to CM face a number of...Read More »
I feel like saying a little bit about why we do what we do, or at least why I do what I do. In the course of my 26-year nursing career, I worked in many venues. For about 14 years, I was an ICU nurse, and although many patients have...Read More »
If you are from the South, football is all that matters. I grew up in Alabama and now live in Mississippi. You have to understand that this time of year all we care about is tailgating and football. So my advice is to weave an analogy...Read More »
Many CDI specialists don’t spend a lot of time working with obstetric (OB) records, or may even ignore them altogether, principally because of the ICD-9-CM Chapter 11 coding guideline that basically says that pregnancy overrides...Read More »
A patient’s medical record contains a wealth of information about his or her hospital encounter, including diagnoses, treatments, operative reports, and ancillary notes. Unfortunately, much of the detailed information found in a patient record is...Read More »
