CDI specialists typically review inpatient records to obtain specificity related to principal and secondary diagnosis. As a profession, such staff combine clinical knowledge with coding, billing, and documentation experience. Although not as prevalent as inpatient efforts, outpatient CDI is a...Read More »
$500,000. That’s what facilities expect as their CDI programs’ annual return on investment (ROI), according to 58% of more than 1,660 respondents to a recent ACDIS website poll (www.hcpro.com/acdis/readerpoll_results.cfm). When...Read More »
CDI professionals must educate facilities and physicians about the importance of accurately capturing the entire disease process because physicians, unfortunately, are frequently reluctant to document additional disease processes in the charts of patients who are obviously about to die.Read More »
"Don’t let the relative quiet fool you,” says James S. Kennedy, MD, CCS, CDIP, president of CDI MD-Physician Champions in Smyrna, Tenn., “there are big changes in this year’s IPPS final rule, changes that represent a paradigm shift in the way CDI programs work.”Read More »
by James P. Fee, MD, CCDS, and Garry L. Huff, MD, CCS, CCDS
Certainly, the alphabetical and tabular index of the ICD-9-CM codebook assume the “postoperative” relationship as causal, but a CDI specialist should investigate this further within the specific clinical context.Read More »
It was around the time of the ACDIS annual conference when Bonnie I. Epps, RN, MSN, manager of CDI for Emory Healthcare in Atlanta, started researching the effect of expanding her CDI program to include pediatric and neonatal units. When asked why she was interested in expanding...Read More »
