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By Cathy Farraher, RN, MBA, CCM, CCDS for ACDIS CDI Blog A typical day for a CDI specialist entails obtaining an assignment, whether it’s all payer or Medicare only, and determining the action course for the day. Best practice would be to perform follow ups on any previously queried charts to allow clinicians to have…
By Meg Bryant for Healthcare Dive Dive Brief: Confidence among the country’s hospital CFOs is low, with just 13% saying their organization is “very prepared” to handle new healthcare payment and delivery models with current financial planning tools, according to Kaufman Hall’s 2019 CFO Outlook: Healthcare report. That’s down from 15% in 2018. Less than a quarter of…
By Tracy Boldt, RN, BSN, CCDS, CDIP, and Ellen Jantzer, RN, MSN, CCDS, CCS, CRC for ACDIS CDI Blog If your organization has an inpatient CDI team, decide if outpatient CDI will share the same reporting structure or if the teams should be separate. A shared reporting structure can allow the new outpatient CDI specialists…
By John Verhovshek, MA, CPC for For the Record A “shared” or “split” patient visit occurs when both a physician and a qualified nonphysician practitioner (NPP) meet face to face with a Medicare patient on the same date of service. In other words, the work of the physician and the NPP are “combined” into a single…
By by Trey La Charité, MD, FACP, SFHM, CCDS for ACDIS CDI Blog People are human. This goes for clinicians, coders, and for CDI personnel. Mistakes happen. If left unchecked, however, mistakes become habits. Effective CDI programs understand this and take appropriate steps to ensure occasional mistakes don’t become recurring bad habits. Since the structure and…
By Cheryl Ericson, MS, RN, CCDS, CDIP for For the Record When discrepancies occur, the ensuing reconciliation process serves as a prime opportunity to educate CDI and coding staffs. Reconciliation rates monitor both clinical documentation improvement (CDI) and coding proficiency, a key performance indicator. However, many in leadership positions overlook the importance of trending reconciliation…
By Tom Sullivan for Healthcare IT News AI is already having a big impact, but strategic planning is not keeping pace and healthcare organizations need to be proactive about developing tools now. Healthcare executives expect artificial intelligence to be among the most impactful technologies fueling innovation, but few are crafting strategies to advance emerging AI…
By Tracy Boldt, RN, BSN, CCDS, CDIP, and Ellen Jantzer, RN, MSN, CCDS, CCS, CRC for ACDIS Blog The rules of compliant query practice do not change based on the setting. We must consider query construction and wording of provider communication with the same eye for compliance as we have traditionally done in the inpatient…
By the Economist AFTER a brain aneurysm in 2004, Mary McClinton was admitted to Virginia Mason Medical Centre in Seattle. Preparing for an x-ray, the 69-year-old was injected not, as she should have been, with a dye that highlights blood vessels, but with chlorhexidine, an antiseptic. Both are colourless liquids. The dye is harmless; the…
By Jackie Drees for Becker’s Hospital Review Vishal Bhatia, MD, chief medical information officer at RCCH HealthCare Partners in Brentwood, Tenn., discusses the evolution of his role as CMIO and how artificial intelligence, natural language processing and voice recognition technologies can improve healthcare. Responses are lightly edited for clarity and length. Question: How has your role…