Q&A: Determining standard clinical criteria for common diagnoses

Q: I understand that most CDI departments develop a standardized list of clinical indicators/criteria to support query efforts. Is this something we need to develop or is it available in the encoder process? If we need to develop this, how do we go about that?

A: While the AHA’s Coding Clinic for ICD-9-CM (ICD-10-CM/PCS) often lists clinical indicators for specific diagnoses, the publication should not be used as a stand-in for the provider’s own clinical judgment, as reiterated in Coding Clinic, First Quarter, 2014, p. 11.

CDI programs should work with the physician team to develop a standardized list of clinical indicators for the team to use in query creation, CDI and physician training, and record review. Such mutually developed criteria is particularly helpful for highly vulnerable or often miss-documented conditions such as levels of malnutrition severity, acute and chronic respiratory failure, acute kidney injury, encephalopathy, etc.

Research nationally established guidelines for these common, core conditions (e.g., ASPEN criteria for malnutrition, or RIFLE or NKIDO criteria for renal failure), then work with the specialty most closely related to that diagnosis (e.g., pulmonologists for acute respiratory failure). This criteria could then be consistently used by CDI and coding staff to initiate a query to support the diagnosis.

Editor’s Note: This question was answered by Lynne Spryszak, RN, CCDS, CPC. At the time of this article's original release, she was a Chicago-based Independent Healthcare Consultant.