Note from the ACDIS Editor: Share your experience with mortality reviews in a CDI Journal article

by Jess Fluegel

While mortality reviews are not a responsibility in every CDI program, it has become a more and more common practice. Without reviewing mortality cases, many organizations find that their expected mortality (i.e., how severely ill their patients look on paper) does not entirely match the observed mortality. Of course, no organization wants it to look like relatively well patients come to their organization and then expire. Enter mortality reviews. After all, assessing the severity of illness, risk of mortality, and present on admission status all fall within the purview of documentation review. Accurately capturing that information in the medical record ensures that expired patients look as sick on the page as they were in the bed, thereby improving the expected to observed mortality ratio.

For our upcoming March/April edition of the CDI Journal, ACDIS is looking at expansion, unconventional settings, and CDI opportunities, and we want to hear from you on topics like mortality reviews! Whether you work on such reviews personally, have overseen the expansion of your CDI department in this area, or other areas, writing an article about your experience and offering advice can provide a great resource for fellow CDI professionals. Plus, Journal writers who publish with us can earn ACDIS CEUs!

To submit an article on this topic or others under the March/April edition, send your draft to be considered for publication to me, Associate Editor Jess Fluegel (jfluegel@acdis.org), as well as Associate Editorial Director Linnea Archibald (larchibald@acdis.org). Also please include a short professional bio and headshot with your submission.

All articles are due by Wednesday, February 1, to be considered in this edition! If that doesn’t work, feel free to still reach out and we can work with you to find a good place for your article.

To earn one (1) Certified Clinical Documentation Specialist (CCDS)/CCDS-Outpatient (CCDS-O) CEU, writers need to have contributed a 700-1,500-word article published in the CDI Journal. Please note that each edition has limited space, so your article may be placed in a different publication as needed, and that only articles chosen for the Journal will be eligible for a CEU at the discretion of the ACDIS editorial team. Contributors published in the Journal receive 0.5 CEUs per 350 published words.

CDI expansion is an exciting and vast topic, so we’re excited for all that this upcoming edition has in store for the CDI community. All are welcome to get involved and contribute—I look forward to reading what you submit you soon!

Editor’s note: Fluegel is an editor for ACDIS. Contact her at jfluegel@acdis.org.