News: CDI collaboration aids coding productivity, survey shows

According to HCPro’s 2019 coding productivity survey, while coding productivity held steady, missing documentation and unanswered queries bog down coders, reported JustCoding. CDI, according to survey respondents, may be able to help ease these troubles.

HIM Briefings (HIMB), ACDIS’ sister publication, asked survey respondents to choose from a list of technology, issues, and tasks and indicate whether they had a positive impact, a negative impact, no impact on coding productivity, or were not applicable to their organizations. In 2018, the most common positive rating was reported with use of computer-assisted coding applications (34.8%).

In 2019, the most common positive rating had a human touch: 38.6% said the relationship with CDI staff had a positive impact on coding productivity. This could be in part because of the advent of concurrent coding processes, JustCoding suggests, or could simply be linked to the increased clarity of the record by the time the coding professional lays eyes on it.

In addition to the CDI shout-out, 2019 survey respondents also indicated higher inpatient coding productivity than in years past.

In 2019, of those respondents who reported measuring productivity by records coded per hour, more (45%) indicated that they coded an average of one to two inpatient charts per hour. However, 37.5% reported that they coded an average of three to four inpatient charts per hour. Compared to 2018, when 51.3% indicated that they coded an average of one to two inpatient charts per hour, that suggests a slight increase in productivity for this record type.

Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in JustCoding.