2023 CDI Leadership Mastermind Hot Topic Guide: Part 1

Stepping into a leadership role can be an exciting development in a CDI professional’s career journey, but it can also be overwhelming and isolating. A leader’s responsibilities are varied and far-reaching and new leaders may feel they are underwater. Rather than treading water alone, leaders can get a much-needed rescue buoy by connecting with peers outside their organizations to collaborate, trade advice, and share challenges and successes. The ACDIS CDI Leadership Council serves the purpose of connecting leaders across the country for conversations about the hot topics and industry trends in CDI. But a smaller subset of the Council, the Mastermind group, provides participants with an opportunity for focused brainstorming and problem solving.

This multitopic report, produced in partnership with 3M Health Information Systems, shares takeaways from the first half of the 2022/2023 CDI Leadership Council Mastermind term. These conversations cover a range of leadership topics, from metrics and monitoring staff performance to the ever-present threat of denials, to problem list management.

We hope that you’ll read the resource fully, but also that you can use it for focused guidance on topics central to your CDI program’s needs.

Three biggest talking points:

• Not only do query metrics help leaders understand how their own staff members are performing, but they can illuminate potential education breakdowns at the facility, service line, or provider level. One of the most valuable things a leader can do with their metrics is parse them. Those individualized metrics may shine a spotlight on areas for improvement, but they can also show you the progress you’ve already made.

• Despite the quantity, fighting denials aggressively is of vital importance. Unfortunately, in many cases it seems that payers are counting on an organization not fighting back and, if the defenses seem weak, they’re likely to push harder.

• When approaching the problem list, you’ll likely encounter misconceptions about the list’s use for coding purposes. While your education will certainly help clear up the confusion, building templates to help providers document accurately will ensure the issue doesn’t arise again.