Note from the Associate Editorial Director: A New Year wish
By Melissa Varnavas
Shortly before New Year’s Day, I looked over my notes from the November 17th HealthLeaders Web cast “5 Ways to Hospital-Physician Quality: Goals, Incentives, Dialogue, Infrastructure, Data.” A statement on first slide of the presentation made pause. It read:
“Why? Fulfillment of personal and institutional mission: Do the right thing.”
Why, the presenter asked, did those listening to this audio chose a profession in healthcare.
CDI professionals, as you well know, follow varied career paths. Generally, they start out as nurses with a mission to care for the sick and help those in need. For some, the rigors of nights and long weekends interfere with family life and growing children. This leads to career diversification. Many see the inherent value of appropriate documentation as an extension of patient care, and this in turn, makes a move to CDI an appropriate professional match. As the presenters pointed out, the mission of healthcare regardless of professional role is consistent—“Do the right thing.”
I couldn’t help but wonder, however, if this statement represents a more fundamental shift in thought. Forgive me for being contemplative. We all know about the economic downturn. Daily we hear the roster of corporate layoffs and healthcare cutbacks. We are not blind. We recognize the warning signs. But what if we take these foretold tempests and turn them into positive winds of change?
We all know that, as President-elect Barack Obama says, change is coming—not only to Washington but to the national healthcare environment as well.
Perhaps the advancement of the CDI profession and our ACDIS membership will come to exemplify one of the more constructive modifications of our national healthcare system.
CDI specialists do not merely examine documentation and chastise the errant physician for inappropriate verbiage or a misplaced descriptor. They facilitate communication across a community that has operated in silos for far too long. They open the door for the discussion.
The CDI specialist asks: “What are we doing here? Why are we doing it?”
Now, we can take that question literally to mean “What type of care does Mr. Jones need, and why?” or think about the question philosophically as a means to question the larger purpose of patient care.
As you’ve no doubt seen in your own careers, positive return on investment in form of increased financial returns often acts as the only lubricant for the wheels of progress. So to increase healthcare quality, good professionals needed to prove the profit in it.
Despite the omnipresence of this unspoken truth, we hear the whispers of a new mantra at the start of this New Year and are happy to be a profession that expects to rise to the call.
As Robert S. Gold, MD, CEO, DCBA, Inc., in Atlanta said during the November quarterly ACDIS conference call “A hospital needs to prove that it is excellent in something. That data comes from CDI programs. The goal of improved documentation is improved documentation.”
Let me offer this wish for 2009, let our efforts toward improved documentation truly influence and improve patient care. Let’s make it our collective goal as ACDIS members this year to “Do the right thing.”
Happy New Year!