by Trey La Charité, MD, FACP, CCDS
Your CDI program successfully obtained consistent results over the last few years, and all is right within the CDI world. Then, the facility case-mix index (CMI) unexpectedly drops. Provided it rebounds, one or two months below its usual average...Read More »
When Claudine Hutchinson, BSN, RN, started working as a pediatric staff nurse at the Children’s Hospital at Saint Francis in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she didn’t know the first thing about clinical documentation improvement. In medical/surgical, orthopedics, hematology-oncology, and pulmonology, she...Read More »
by Paul Evans, RHIA, CCS, CCS-P, CCDS, and Anny Yuen, RHIA, CCS, CCDS, CDIP
The debate regarding which profession makes the “best” CDI specialist unfortunately continues. Many facilities and consulting firms, initially trained to believe that only nurses could perform the duties of a CDI...Read More »
The 2016 ACDIS/AHIMA Guidelines for Achieving a Compliant Query Practice call on CDI or coding pro- fessionals to query physicians if the documentation:
Describes or is associated with clinical indicators without a definitive relationship to an underlying diagnosis
The Third International Consensus Definitions for Sepsis and Sep- tic Shock published new clinical guidelines for diagnosing sepsis, dubbed Sepsis-3, earlier this year in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).
Although CMS chose not to adopt the new criteria in a...Read More »
I am the CDI liaison and a DRG coordinator for Maine Medical Center in Portland, the largest hospital in the state with 637 beds. I chose my coding career path in high school, but I had no idea what I wanted to study in...Read More »
Robin Jones, RN, BSN, MHA/Ed, CCDS, has a true passion for CDI. She’s been in the field since 2004, beginning her career as a CDI specialist. A few years later, she was promoted to manager. Now she serves as the system director at Mercy Health in Cincinnati, where she oversees...Read More »