Note from the ACDIS Director: We hope you enjoyed a heaping helping from our CDI Kitchen!
by Brian Murphy
Our 11th annual CDI Week is now yummy leftovers in the fridge, but the limitless potential of the CDI profession remains firmly in view.
Our theme this year was CDI Kitchen: Recipes for a Successful Program, a concept my team developed that I admittedly met with some initial skepticism. My favorite all-time theme is CDI Superheroes, as I believe CDI professionals perform great acts on a daily basis. That’s a hard act to follow.
Truthfully, I’m not much of a cook outside of the smoker and the grill. But the more we talked about it, I quickly “warmed” to the idea (pun intended). CDI specialists are like chefs in a busy kitchen, managing a process involving many actors (ingredients) while trying to meet the varied appetites of stressed physicians, hungry auditors, and picky coding criteria and guidelines.
To meet these many needs that CDI professionals face, we offered up a lot of content, which you can still access here, including the annual Industry Overview Survey Report, daily Q&As, a free webinar, downloadable poster, games, recipe card template, and other goodies.
Recipe for success
Many ingredients go into creating both CDI professionals and the departments in which they work.
CDI professionals are smart, inquisitive, communicative, and persistent; I liken their work to that of detectives. CDI managers increasingly need to be data-savvy and able to manage remote, multidisciplinary, diverse teams. Both need to be flexible working with other departments, particularly quality and coding, and empathetic when working with busy physicians.
CDI departments have a lot of responsibilities on their plate that includes hospital finance, quality, and clinical accuracy. They engage physicians by providing service line and individual performance metrics that allow them to track case mix index, observed versus expected mortalities, and complication rates against their peers.
That’s a lot of (chef’s) hats, but CDI wears them well. What was once a profession that few, even within healthcare, had ever heard of, has now become a must-have department. It’s no exaggeration to say that, now, hospitals cannot survive without a strong CDI presence. They are the master chef in the kitchen of the mid-revenue cycle.
A few (really good) leftovers
If you didn’t get a chance to read through our CDI Week Industry Overview Survey Report, I recommend you turn on the gas and get cooking. Here are some of the highlights that I found particularly interesting:
- Our survey included 944 responses, nearly 100 more than last year and our highest to date, so we feel extremely confident in the data.
- Only 53% of CDI specialists perform verbal queries, and less than a quarter (24%) round with their docs. While these trends are likely exaggerated due to remote work forced by the pandemic, the question is, will these changes be permanent?
- Most CDI specialists perform concurrent reviews of the healthcare record (92%) for financial impact (87%) or quality/nonfinancial outcomes (84%) (which are sometimes actually indirectly financial if you consider POA status and HACs). Only 7.5% of respondents said they don’t review for quality measures at all. So, while finance remains front and center, CDI is about a lot more than money.
- Growth continues in outpatient CDI. Just over 24% of 2021 respondents noted their CDI team reviews outpatient charts in some capacity, up from 19.73% of 2020 respondents. Another 22% plan to do so. Most in this area focus on HCCs (45%); 33% perform prospective reviews, 31% retrospective, and 16% concurrent (given the brevity of OP encounters, I’m not exactly sure how that latter is done unless with a physician facing assistive technology). This is the wave of the future.
In summary, thank you for all that you do in helping to ensure the financial and quality health of our nation’s hospitals. Thanks for celebrating in our CDI Kitchen for a week. We hope you enjoyed a great week, recharged with new ideas, and we look forward to CDI Week 2022!
Editor’s Note: Murphy is the director ACDIS. Contact him at bmurphy@acdis.org.