Years ago, the physician you saw for your annual checkup was the physician in charge of your care should you need to be admitted to the hospital. Today, however, this model has changed. With the complexity of care now required for many illnesses, and the complexity of physician structures at...Read More »
What is the goal of a CDI program? Most of the ones I see still focus on DRG optimization. We need to make the physicians allies of our CDI programs, and right now they are not. Instead, they are often targets of our queries. So how do you make the transition? By changing physician behavior one...Read More »
When Kari S. Ellis, RN, accepted a CDI position at the small, 100-bed Daviess Community Hospital in Washington, Ind., she had no documentation improvement experience. So when Ellis reached out, Terri Leap, RN, BSN, MBA, CDI specialist at Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis began to consider...Read More »
The road to ICD-10 has been a long one, and we still have many miles ahead of us. Organizations have invested a significant amount of time and money into this venture, and even though October 1 is rapidly approaching, there’s still work to be done before and after implementation.
“Documentation can be greatly improved by a properly functioning query process,” AHIMA says in its 2008 “Managing an Effective Query Process” practice brief. But how can you tell whether your query process works? Peer-to-peer review of query practices and outcomes may provide a low-cost,...Read More »
In 2004, I passed the AAPC certification exam and became a certified professional coder. Since that time, I’ve worked as a coder in several different specialties. When I began my first coding assignment as a new coding graduate with no coding experience, I had...Read More »