Note from the ACDIS Editor: Explore quality and population health topics in the new CDI Journal!
by Jess Fluegel
As the healthcare world has evolved and, even with some ups and downs, moved toward practices that center value-based care, it’s encouraging to see quality and population health enter the conversation more often. But that growing focus also exposes the cracks. Without accurate data, quality and population health initiatives build on a shaky foundation that is just as likely to break as benefit the patients and populations they’re trying to serve.
If data is the foundation of a healthcare organization’s efforts for change, then CDI is the concrete needed to fortify and repair it. You won’t be able to spot opportunities for better quality of care—or population health problems to address—if the documentation doesn’t tell the patient’s full story. In the November/December edition of the CDI Journal, our last of 2026, we thought it important to spend time on the intentional ways CDI programs can and should work with quality and population health at their organizations.
In this edition, readers will find articles about:
- Quality, population health, and the CDI specialist's impact
- Using the Elixhauser Comorbidity Index to understand a patient’s story
- Building clinical governance across CDI, coding, quality, and physician education
- What’s new in the Guidelines for Achieving a Compliant Query Practice update
- Advice on improving readmission outcomes
- Critical care, critically under-coded: An ED documentation story
- Overview of the Inpatient Surgical Complication Mortality Rate (ISCMR)
- Establishing a process to improve the O/E ratio
- How CDI can turn a common Alaska diagnosis into a population health story
- Social determinants of health and meeting the patient where they’re at
- An overview of acute myocardial infarction updates and potential denial impact
The ACDIS team hopes you enjoy this latest edition and find something helpful in its pages. As always, the CDI Journal is a benefit of ACDIS membership. To learn more about joining ACDIS, click here. ACDIS members can earn one CCDS/CCDS-O CEU for reading each edition of the Journal and taking the associated quiz. You can learn more on the full edition download page.
Our next edition will be about query practices and provider education! Contributing to the CDI Journal is a great opportunity for CDI professionals to share insight with the community, plus you can receive 0.5 CEU per 350 published words (articles tend to be around the 750-1,500-word mark). If you have advice to share on engaging and educating providers, creating query templates, ensuring query compliance, or a similar topic, we’d love to receive your submission.
The deadline for the January/February edition is December 1, 2026! You can send your submissions via this form: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/CDI-journal.
I hope you enjoy the diverse insight found in this final edition of 2026, and maybe even find a key yourself to unlock doors into all the good your CDI efforts can do! Please reach out to me if you have any questions about the Journal or writing for our next edition.
Editor’s note: Fluegel is the editor for ACDIS. Contact her at jess.fluegel@hcpro.com.