All Entries Tagged With: "contest"
Talk about documentation catches, simple mistakes cause profound costs
Sometimes documentation mistakes caught by CDI professionals are the simple ones. Like an incorrect date. I recently came upon this news brief from New York Injury News which outlined the trials of HIV patient who lost his coverage due to inaccurate documentation of a blood-test date.
You find vital information in the medical record everyday. Tell us about some of your 'best find' stories.
As compassionate people living day-to-day it’s easy to vilify the insurance company for dropping a sick person from its coverage rosters, or point the finger at the patient for not keeping better tabs on his or her clinical and coverage information. Yet CDI professionals well know the costs of seemingly simple mistakes. This particular case ended up costing the insurance company, Fortis, $10 million for inappropriate denial of healthcare coverage and added untold difficulties to a young man’s life.
Well, I know that CDI specialists catch these seemingly simple mistakes all the time. So here’s a special request to ACDIS Blog readers—wouldn’t it be nice to receive recognition for those otherwise unseen documentation catches you make everyday? Send me your funniest, most heart wrenching, or simply ‘best catch’ documentation stories by the end of October. We’ll run them by our editorial panel and pick the best to publish. E-mail me at mvarnavas@cdiassociation.com.
CDI professionals of the year nominated
Who'll win the big one this year?
yet. Here’s a sneak peek at what healthcare professionals say about their nominees:
- “In the past 18 months I feel that we have had breakthrough in physician acceptance of documentation improvement, both in its importance to the organization and to their own practice.”
- This CDI professional “skillfully extracts ‘real’ medical record entries, poses appropriate queries to small groups of physicians, and ultimately convinces the physicians that further specifying a patient’s diagnosis or better explaining a procedure best explains what has occurred with a patient.”
- This CDI professional “worked with our executive management staff to demonstrate a 5.1% opportunity to increase severity of illness and 32.4% opportunity to increase risk of mortality, and a 4.0% opportunity to increase the case mix index. “
- “We all know improved documentation improves revenue, but now we are able to show hard evidence that documentation improves the length of stay, the severity of illness, the mortality ratings, and overall patient care quality. [This CDI speicalist's] creative thinking has influenced many hospital changes and probably many more to come.”
If you know a CDI specialist in your organization worthy of being named “CDI Professional of the Year” fill out the form and e-mail ACDIS Director Brian Murphy at bmurphy@cdiassociation.com.
CDI Professional of Year nomination forms due April 1–send them in!
Hi everyone, I just wanted to send out a final reminder that nomination forms for our CDI Professional of the Year award are due in next Wednesday, April 1.
What makes a CDI Professional of the Year ? Well, there are no hard-and-fast guidelines. Here’s a few suggestions:
- A manager who helped implement a successful program
- A colleague who works hard at their job and is passionate about what they do
- A persistent CDI specialist who got a difficult physician to finally break down, buy into a program, and document in the record
- A CDI specialist working on their own in a small hospital on a shoestring budget, doing all that he or she can to get their program off the ground (if this matches a description of someone you know, nominate them!)
This is your chance to help a colleague recieve the recognition he or she deserves. We will be handing out our second CDI Professional of Year award at our upcoming conference in Las Vegas on May 14-15. The winner will receive a trophy and free admission. We also plan to hand out two awards for Recognition of CDI Achievement to two other deserving professionals. All three winners will recieve their awards and be recognized at our networking luncheon.
ACDIS members can read the story of last year’s winner, Randi Ferrare, published in CDI Journal.
Submitting a nomination is simple. Just go to to our awards page, fill out the form, and e-mail it to myself at bmurphy@cdiassociation.com.
Finally, you can expect a sneak preview of some current nominees later this week.
Thanks, and best of luck!
Brian
No blarney, you’ve got the luck of the Irish
Feeling lucky?
There’s not much time left in the good old Irish holiday of four leaf clovers and other Celtic mythologies. So before all your luck runs out, we here at ACDIS wanted to offer our own sort of celebration in the form of a quick contest.
It’s simple. We’ll pick one random winner from those who leave a comment on this post to receive a free copy of “Coding and You: What every healthcare professional should know.” The handbook comes in packs of 10 so you can hand them out to finicky physicians or stubborn (not like the Irish) healthcare workers who don’t seem to understand the importance of coding and appropriate documentation yet.
We know sometimes the RSS feed doesn’t always post to your inbox right away so we’ll give you until noon Wednesday, March 18.
Good luck!
Take a survey, win a seat. What a deal!
What luck!
“Diligence is the mother of good luck.”
—Benjamin Franklin
Somehow every summer my husband finds dozens of four-leaf clovers in our yard. I can look and look around the lawn right next to him and not catch a glimpse of anything more rare than a dandelion tuft or two. Maybe Cindi Cross, CCS, DRG specialist at the University of Colorado Hospital, has some similar hidden talent for tapping into the luck of the Irish since her name was randomly chosen from more than 300 others to receive a free spot at the ACDIS annual conference in Las Vegas, May 14-15.
About a month ago, ACDIS launched its Physician Query Benchmarking Survey asking clinical documentation improvement specialists to log in and answer 20 questions regarding their physican query policies and practices. The drawing Cindi won was a token of our gratitude for the overwhelming response we received on the survey.
In the next few weeks, the ACDIS advisory board plans to review the the survey and offer additional analysis about the results. Here’s a sample question from the survey:
We’ll release portions of the White Paper here, in the ACDIS Blog, and on the ACDIS Web site, www.cdiassociation.com, under the helpful resources button so members can access it once it is compiled.
Being a DRG specialist, Cindi’s looking forward to attending the following programs when she comes to Vegas:
- Identifying the clinical ‘hidden agenda’ in the medical record
- How and where to identify opportunities in a DRG-based CDI program
- Hospitals cannot live by DRGs alone
- What not to ask physicians
So, I guess it’s only fitting that the thing she likes best about her job “is that I am constantly learning and growing in my profession every day.”
Congratulations, Cindi! See you in May.
Participate in Physician Query Benchmarking Survey
CDI professionals spent the bulk of 2008 worrying and wondering what guidance AHIMA would finally offer for conducting physician queries. The back and forth negotiation of final guidance development proved fruitful for many healthcare stakeholders from compliance to finance, health information to clinical documentation improvement.
But it’s time to take the guidance off the shelf and see how those in our profession actually use the physician query process every day. Please take a moment to participate in our ACDIS Physician Query Benchmarking Survey.
We will analyze the results and issue a report later this spring. While the best part of participation really comes from the sharing of information and the general condition of creating community. . . ACDIS Director Brian Murphy sweetened this incentive by adding a little contest to the mix. One lucky participant will be chosen at random to receive a free admission to this year’s ACDIS conference at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas. If the winner already has a paid seat to the conference then he or she gets a free pass to the pre-conference event, ICD-9 Coding Essentials: What every CDI specialist needs to know.
So, click here, take the survey, help your fellow CDI professionals, and enter for a chance to win! Note that we plan to conduct these benchmarking surveys on a quarterly basis, and offer them exclusively for ACDIS members.