For many, outpatient CDI is still a new frontier. An outpatient CDI effort might be kicked off by success on the inpatient side and some preliminary wins with outpatient record reviews for ambulatory or emergency services. Programs with full-blown CDI efforts into system-owned physician...Read More »
"I remember talking to some of the folks who work in CDI at conferences, and when I would ask them about psych units, none of them had CDI working on those units at all,” says Suzanne Dennis, CTRS, CCDS, director of clinical services/documentation specialist at Acadia Healthcare...Read More »
By Sharme Brodie, RN, CCDS
So, the first AHA Coding Clinic for 2018 is out, and I must admit, I was surprised at its length. At only 26 pages, it is one of the shorter editions of late. Some of the questions covered within its few pages, however, were ones I often discuss...Read More »
Scope creep is “really the whole sentiment that since we’re already in the record, we can do more and more,” says Lara Faustino, RN, BSN, CCDS, a CDI specialist at Boston Medical Center. “It happened gradually for us.”
As CDI programs mature, they move away from the easy-...Read More »
What’s a CDI specialist to do when queries go answered? What if a physician has a backlog of unanswered queries from three weeks prior? Or what if a physician patently refuses to answer queries and says “I don’t have time” or “it’s all about the money”?
By Allen Frady, RN-BSN, CCDS, CCS, CRC
If you mention analytics or key performance indicators (KPI) in relation to thought leaders on social media, you may be treated as though you’ve just suggested the world is flat and the earth is the center of the solar system.
As part of the eighth annual Clinical Documentation Improvement Week, ACDIS has conducted a series of interviews with CDI professionals on a variety of emerging industry topics. Caryn Nowak, RHIA, CDIP, a clinical documentation specialist at Rady Children’s Hospital in San Diego...Read More »
The question most frequently asked of CDI programs, in my experience, is why the case mix index (CMI) is so low. The asker is different from facility to facility—the question may come from the C-suite (chief executive officer, financial officer,...Read More »
