Note from the ACDIS Director: Is your CDI department perceived as valuable?

October 8, 2020

CDI Strategies - Volume 14, Issue 46

by Brian Murphy

The COVID-19 pandemic brought into stark relief the fact that CDI departments must have a strong and consistent mechanism for displaying the value they bring to their organizations. It doesn’t necessarily matter what that value is—financial impact, quality improvement, code accuracy, provider engagement, improved patient satisfaction scores—just that it has to reflect a demonstrable impact, and be aligned with an organization’s goals and objectives.

The hard truth is that CDI departments that failed to demonstrate value fared worse in the pandemic than those whose organizations understood the value CDI brings to the table.

An audience poll conducted on the September 30 episode of the ACDIS Podcast showed some good signs, but also indicated more work needs to be done for communicating the value of CDI. From the show:

How would you describe the perception of value by your hospital/organization administration, of your CDI department?
They perceive CDI as extremely valuable/indispensable	43%
They perceive CDI as somewhat valuable	42%
They perceive CDI as low value and/or it’s under the radar	9%
Not applicable	3%
Don’t know	4%

The good news is that we can get stronger. To do that, we’re asking for your help.

Associations only work when people give as much as they take. The ACDIS Advisory Board is building a new CDI toolkit and needs your assistance. In order to compile a library of the latest resources and examples to reference, we ask you to please share any helpful tools, report samples, dashboards, metrics, or guidance on how you demonstrate your CDI program’s value to the organization.

Value may include patient care, patient outcomes, publicly reported quality data, company reputation and financial health, billing and reimbursement, case mix index, CC/MCC/hierarchical condition category capture, risk adjustment factor score impact, CDI query impact, staff retention rates, coverage rates, etc.

We hope to promote industry growth and advancement by discovering and sharing metrics, reporting methods, and tips.

If you wish to share any materials, please delete all organizational branding, including company names, images, and logos (unless otherwise directed by your organization) and delete any protected health information before you send. We cannot advertise any company’s name, logo, or violate HIPAA.

Please send all materials to me. If you have any questions about a possible submission, or the project in general, shoot me an email.

The ACDIS advisory board is committed to bringing you additional resources and an eventual toolkit/repository of all that we collect, to help with this broader effort of making CDI’s value loud and clear.

Thank you in advance for your contributions. In the meantime, we hope you found these resources helpful:

Editor’s note: Murphy is the director for ACDIS. Contact him at bmurphy@acdis.org.

Found in Categories:

ACDIS Guidance, CDI Management