Kerry Termaat, RN, MSM, CCDS, is the supervisor of CDI at ProHealth Care—Waukesha Memorial Hospital. Termaat will be presenting a poster at the 2018 ACDIS Conference entitled “Eight-day process to improve physician query response rate,” with Sara Neitzel, RN, BSN, and Lisa Berghauer, BSN, RN, CCDS, CDI specialists at ProHealth Care. Make sure to stop by the dedicated poster session and see all the presenters’ posters.

Q: How did you decide on the topic?

A: Our physician advisor, Juliet Ugarte Hopkins, MD, CHCQM, was recently interviewed for an article in For the Record magazine in regards to our eight-business-day model for physician query response. It gave us the idea to show other CDI teams the affect they could make by using a consistent process in their daily work. This process was developed in 2014 and we have worked over the past three-plus years to implement and improve it. We have seen such dramatic positive results it seemed like the perfect thing to share with others.

Every year, ACDIS celebrates the achievements of exceptional CDI professionals. Nominations come from peers in the industry. The ACDIS Conference Committee then reviews applications and chooses the final winners.

To maximize the staff’s ability to focus their attention on the records with documentation improvement opportunity, most CDI programs have implemented creative methods to identify which records to review each day. Many programs attempt to prioritize records for review by leveraging clinical experience to take a best guess at which records are more likely to have a documentation integrity concern.

This morning, the “CMS guy,” as he referred to himself, took the stage to open Day 2 of the 2018 ACDIS conference. David S. Nilasena, MD, MSPH, MS, the chief medical office for CMS’ Dallas Regional Office, shared some insight into the new CMS programs aimed at improving quality and reducing regulatory burdens for providers. Though each program he talked about has different requirements and focal points, they all shared a common goal, Nilasena said. “For CMS, our ‘One Thing’ is that patients come first,” he said, referencing this year’s conference theme.