The ability of healthcare institutions worldwide to maintain a high level of patient satisfaction depends on their ability to manage large amounts of complicated data effectively. Clinical documentation must be accurate for patients to have a positive health experience since an inaccurate record of information can harm both the medical coding career and the ones who trust the institutions with their lives.
However, Clinical Documentation Improvement (CDI) services can help to reduce the number of errors in medical records. Documenting patient care and sharing that data with other healthcare professionals is what CDI is all about. In the long run, CDI will help both patients and healthcare providers since it assures that the healthcare professional has access to the correct patient records and information.
The following are six reasons why adopting a CDI program in your healthcare business can be beneficial:
Table of Contents
1. Enhanced Brand Awareness
In order to arrive at a hospital’s rating, rating methodologies, you need to consider many complex factors. You see, the quality of care, patient safety, clinical outcomes, and so on are becoming more and more dependent on documentation.
Therefore, patients, medical students, residents, and physicians seek out hospitals based on their rankings, regardless of whether they are academic medical centers or community organizations. Accordingly, attracting top talent will put the hospital in a better position to build programs that improve its reputation and financial performance in the long run.
2. Decreased Denials of Reimbursement
Due to greater clinical documentation, a good CDI program helps to reduce the denial of reimbursements and enhance the appeals process. It is advantageous because the process encourages accurate coding of a patient’s clinical status for reimbursement purposes.
3. Better Engagement
You can break down operational and information silos through CDI education, leading to enhanced physician involvement and increased staff productivity. As evidence-based medicine becomes more prevalent, CDI specialists collaborate with physicians to ensure that they speak the same language from the clinical perspective.
It is possible to ensure the coding staff’s integrity and encourage an accurate representation of what physicians have documented by educating them. It is beneficial for all coding team members if the nurses and coders communicate often.
Today, health care providers and hospital administrators realize the importance of CDI procedures to maintain a good financial outlook. An effective CDI program ensures that physician documentation accurately portrays the patient’s clinical picture and consequently reflects the integrity of financial, clinical, and quality outcomes in a meaningful way.
4. Improved Patient Care & Accuracy
Inpatient care is more precise, thanks to improved documentation procedures and instruments. An institution’s reputation and patient outcomes can benefit from high-quality medical care, with CDI improving the success rate.
Thanks to CDI, every patient’s care team member, present, and future, have access to up-to-date information. Clinical care can also be accentuated by providing patients with real-time information about their condition and treatment options. At the end of the day, patient care is a top focus for CDI’s tools and guidance.
5. Enhanced CMI
The case mix index (CMI), a measure of a hospital’s performance, typically rises in facilities that use CDI. The following formula depicts the hospital’s typical diagnosis-related group figures: Total discharges divided by the total number of DRG weights for Medicare patients.
Moreover, a hospital’s income and claim reimbursements tend to rise with every successful implementation of clinical documentation improvement programs. By using CDI, the hospital can better deploy its valuable specialists.
6. Reduced Physician Inquiries
The language and documentation used by healthcare professionals impact other departments, such as reimbursement and quality statistics. In line with this, coders are responsible for analyzing physician notes and assigning CPT and ICD codes based on the patient’s medical history.
To solve the issue, coders sometimes call physicians for further documentation when the patient’s records are unclear, incomplete, inconsistent, or otherwise unreliable. Tackling this, professional CDI support reduces clinical documentation errors with on-demand data access.
What Is The Objective Of An Improved Clinical Documentation Plan?
A clinical documentation improvement plan entails a multidisciplinary effort across the hospital to ensure that the correct diagnostic and treatment codes are assigned to patients. CDI specialists review patients’ medical records to accurately reflect their diagnosis, their treatment, and how well they are cared for.
Who Should Invest In CDI Programs?
Clinicians, inpatient coders, and clinical documentation specialists all use CDI programs. They play the following parts in a CDI strategy:
1. Inpatient coders
Inpatient coders ensure that the medical code accurately reflects the patient’s condition. They also receive training in diagnostic criteria and clinical terminology. Coding guidelines, sequencing, and code selection are all improved. Coders typically answer to the chief executive officer of the institution.
2. Clinicians
Doctors of medicine (MDs), nurse practitioners, nurse anesthetists, podiatrists (DPMs), osteopathic doctors (DOs), physician assistants (PAs), residents, and other qualified healthcare providers may all be involved in CDI. Wound care, laboratory, and care management staff are some of the other healthcare professionals in the CDI team.
A CDI would be incomplete without input from clinicians intimately familiar with the patient and the ailments they are treating. They have a direct impact on every subsequent step in the process.
3. Clinical Documentation Specialists
Clinical documentation specialists analyze patients’ medical records while in the hospital. They contact clinicians for clarification or more proof to verify that the correct codes are assigned to patient records. CDS requests are typically requested face-to-face to ensure precise and effective communication.
In addition, they train medical professionals by delivering lectures at conferences and gatherings of the medical staff; with the help of a coding specialist, the CDS and the inpatient coder exchange information. The nursing department is usually where CDSs show up.
Conclusion
The clinical documentation specialist’s job is to analyze the patient’s medical record while in the hospital and then submit the document for clarification.
The specialist should meet with healthcare professionals to improve communication. Accordingly, a CDI is unique to each site. While some sites need to focus on correct coding, others excel at maximizing patient outcomes. Management coding and evaluation, ICD-10 diagnosis codes, and CPT procedure codes are all focus areas for CDI programs.