Happy Holidays!  Sorry this is not a Charles Dicken’s Christmas story, but it does reflect an equally powerful story: A Tale of Two Cities. This Dickens novel has a well-known […]

I think it’s reasonable to say that most people working in health care are motivated to deliver high quality care to the people they serve. Because humans are complicated organisms, […]

It is very easy to get aggravated with providers who do not appear to be engaged with CDI programs. But let’s hold on. Where should their focus be? Sorry, but […]

We frequently discuss with clients the differences between Inpatient CDI versus Outpatient CDI such as time, volume, coding, regulation, etc. Despite these differences, both require collaboration between departments to be […]

It has been two years since AHIMA updated the Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting with a statement about clinical validity. You would think with lessons learned plus time and […]

As the volume of outpatient care has grown over the past several years, so has interest in outpatient clinical documentation improvement (CDI). Yet many organizations struggle to define what exactly […]

As a rabid theater-goer, I love Sondheim.  Note the quote below: “Bit by bit, putting it together… Piece by piece, only way to make a work of art. Every moment […]

Roughly 40 percent of healthcare financial leaders say their organizations lack in-house expertise and staffing for extremely important activities, such as managing new regulations and payment models. The gaps put […]

As a child, I loved playing the game telephone. It was always hysterical to hear the message that the last person heard as compared to the message the originator sent. […]

HCCs are a “problem.” By that I mean no organization can ignore the impact of HCCs. No CDI specialist, HIM professional, quality specialist, provider or billing auditor can remain uneducated […]

May is Mental Health month. It is a reminder to revisit outpatient CDI for substance disorders and mental health disorders. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) statistics indicate […]

Is your CDI program in a rut? Has your performance plateaued or even diminished? Maybe your program has a case of the “same-ole-itis,” otherwise known as “the way we have always done it” disease. In the words of the song from the musical Auntie Mame,* “Open a new window, open a new door!”