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.

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.

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.

• 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.