Membership update: Free webinar focuses on CDI training for hospital residents

Although documentation matters more and more in today’s world of ever-changing regulations, medical students often don’t receive any education on the topic. Approximately 40% of medical students have never even heard or seen the term “CDI,” according to a recent survey conducted by Lisa Dias, MD, and P. Roger DeVersa, MD, MBA, FHM, CPE, CDIP, CHDA, CCS, from the University of Tennessee (Chattanooga) College of Medicine. So, CDI programs have begun to institute home-grown documentation education for residents at their facilities.

“The residents are the ones doing the actual documentation, so we spend a lot of time communicating with them anyway,” says Tamara Hicks, RN, BSN, MHA, CCS, CCDS, ACM, director at Wake Forest Baptist Health in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and a current member of the ACDIS Advisory Board.

Since the residents are documenting in the record that a CDI specialist reviews, adding in some resident education will further the cause of CDI. Educating the attending will not necessarily improve the documentation in the record if the residents are the ones physically documenting.

But, finding the time to train residents around their busy rotations—and doing so in a concise, effective manner—can be difficult for CDI managers and residency program coordinators.

To help clear the fog, Laurie Prescott, MSN, RN, CCDS, CDIP, CRC, CDI education director for ACDIS and developer and lead instructor for the ACDIS Boot Camp line, shared her best practices and teaching strategies for hospital residents in a free 60-minute webinar. To watch the webinar, click here.

Editor's note: Selections of this article were taken from the July/August issue of the CDI Journal. To read the Journal in full, click here. To read the specific article from which this selection came, click here. For more information about bringing documentation training for hospital residents to your organization, please e-mail nasales@hcpro.com or call 877-233-8734. To learn more about CDI Essential Skills for the Hospital Resident, please visit our web page.