2022 CDI Leadership Mastermind Hot Topic Guide: Part 1

CDI leaders’ responsibilities are varied and far reaching. Rather than going the journey alone, leaders can gain valuable insight by connecting with peers outside their organizations to collaborate, trade advice, and share challenges and successes. The ACDIS CDI Leadership Council serves the purpose of connecting leaders across the country for conversations about the hot topics and industry trends in CDI. But a smaller subset of the Council, the Mastermind group, provides participants with an opportunity for focused brainstorming and problem solving.

This multitopic report, produced in partnership with 3M Health Information Systems, shares takeaways from the first half of the 2021/2022 CDI Leadership Council Mastermind term. These conversations cover a range of leadership topics, from the delicate and necessary process of internal staff audits to the perils of CDI scope creep, to the challenges of clinical validation.

We hope that you’ll read the resource fully, but also that you can use it for focused guidance on topics central to your CDI program’s needs.

Three biggest talking points:

• While asking staff to audit their peers’ work may seem like a relatively simple way to begin a quality assurance process, it’s important to be clear up front about what you expect from the auditors and the staff members being audited. Before you launch an audit process, leaders should set forth guidelines for what a good review actually is.
• While scope creep can pose obvious issues for a CDI team, the fact that CDI is constantly evolving to help with new projects and initiatives can also be seen as a good thing. Unlike other professions, CDI is rarely stagnant and there are always opportunities for growth and learning.
• Clinically validating every diagnosis as part of the concurrent or retrospective process—while an excellent aim—may not be possible from a staff bandwidth perspective. Choosing your battles and targeting the diagnoses that are highly vulnerable to denials will give you the biggest payoff for your efforts.