Membership update: Talk10Tuesday features ACDIS member for outpatient chat

Last week’s Talk10Tuesday podcast featured one of ACDIS’ own members, Tracy Boldt, RN, BSN, CCDS, CDIP, for a chat about outpatient CDI. Boldt is the system manager of CDI at Essentia Health, an integrated health system serving patients in Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Dakota, and Idaho, and helped to rollout their outpatient CDI program in July 2017.

Before even starting the outpatient program, Boldt suggests doing some research to prove your expansion is worth the trouble. “We did a full gap analysis on between 200 and 400 accounts to find any evidence that we had either coding issues or actual documentation issues,” she said on the program.

The results, according to Boldt, won’t be surprising to anyone venturing into outpatient CDI. Some of their areas for improvement were:

• Amputations
• Morbid obesity
• Diabetes with complications
• Cancer
• Cerebral palsy in the pediatric population

After the gap analysis was completed, Boldt said, the CDI team at Essentia spent time shadowing the providers. This was to gauge the need for CDI specialists’ help in the various service lines and measure the providers’ knowledge of CDI concerns.

From there, the Essentia team began educating the providers identified as needing CDI input. This was, and is, a big task, Boldt said on the program. There are currently four outpatient CDI specialists reviewing more than 500 charts each week.

“What we ended up doing was identifying some RNs at the clinics and doing time-studies to figure out if they could fit a little more into their schedules. Now, they work alongside the CDI-coders and the CDI-RNs,” Boldt said.

By employing CDI specialists from both coding and clinical backgrounds, Essentia plays to everyone’s strengths, Boldt said. “The coders keep a spreadsheet of all the patients they see and the RNs go in and take care of the clinical piece,” she said.

Though Essentia’s outpatient CDI program is fairly new, Boldt said she’s optimistic of what they can accomplish. “We’ve had some hurtles along the way, but all-in-all, we have a great program going,” she said.

Editor’s note: To listen to the Talk10Tuesday episode from August 29, click here. To read the May/June issue of the CDI Journal focused on CDI expansion, click here. To listen to a recent episode of ACDIS Radio focused on outpatient CDI, click here.