It took some time to break down the wall between coders and CDI specialists at New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C. However, that wall eventually crumbled. During roundtable discussions, participants perform post-bill case reviews of...Read More »
$500,000. That’s what facilities expect as their CDI programs’ annual return on investment (ROI), according to 58% of more than 1,660 respondents to a recent ACDIS website poll (www.hcpro.com/acdis/readerpoll_results.cfm). When...Read More »
by James P. Fee, MD, CCDS, and Garry L. Huff, MD, CCS, CCDS
Certainly, the alphabetical and tabular index of the ICD-9-CM codebook assume the “postoperative” relationship as causal, but a CDI specialist should investigate this further within the specific clinical context.Read More »
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 »
