A Friday toast to lessons learned

Believe it or not there is an association for associations. And yes, Brian Murphy and I are soon to be members. Just as ACDIS provides a venue for CDI specialists to share best practices, the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE) and the Center for Association Leadership offers us helpful hints about how to help you. For instance, on the ASAE Blog “Acronym,” Brian Birch outlined a number of the valuable lessons he learned from his members.

I hope you can see where I’m going with all of this, my usual circular logic notwithstanding, since

'The Lesson' by Pablo Picasso. Don't we all have something to learn from one another?

what I’m hoping to convey is the power of circular learning. We all have something to learn from each other: The coder from the clinical experience of the nurse and the nurse from the regulatory understanding of the coder; the physician from the CDI specialist and CDI specialist from the specific knowledge of disease pathways locked away inside the mind of a physician.

So Mr. Murphy and I thought we’d put together a short list of items we learned from the members of ACDIS over the past few years. Things like:

• Once a nurse, always a nurse.
• Urosepsis is a four-letter word.
• Old physicians can learn new documentation tricks.
• Minutiae matters.
• It is easier to work with someone than for something.
• Be careful of the word acute.

And I think Brian Murphy and I learned the importance of the day-to-day work which CDI specialists pour their hearts into. As Mr. Birch wrote: “The best thing I have learned is that they are out there, professionals with strong minds and hearts who are just trying to make a better lives for themselves and their families.”

And so, a toast: To all the lovely lessons learned and all the casual teachers who have taken perhaps the briefest of moments to share their insights with me, their peers, and their coworkers. Please take a moment yourselves to post your own favorite lesson and give a shout out to the mentor who helped you most in the comment section below.