Regulatory Committee Insight: COVID-19 in children—The CDI team’s effect

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, the role of the CDI specialist becomes a crucial part of the effort to accurately track the public’s health. As the link between the clinicians and the coders, CDI professionals are uniquely positioned to provide support to both services for coding COVID-19’s impact. As the pandemic has evolved here in the United States, CDI teams have risen to the challenge of staying up to date with new COVID-19 literature describing the various patient presentations and new ICD-10-CM codes for COVID-19.

CDI professionals have been busy educating and querying the clinical teams to get clear documentation of COVID-19 as well as the secondary diagnoses in the disease cascade. CDI teams have worked with the coding teams to ensure that the coded data submitted to the various state and federal agencies is an accurate reflection of their health systems’ patient population. Up to now, the public health data collection has been mainly focused on the adult COVID-19 patient but we are beginning to see data indicating that COVID-19 is impacting children’s health as well.