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Kalena Britt, Director of CDI at Rochester Health, oversees and educates teams at five different facilities. In her role, she identifies trends and opportunities where educational strategies can improve CDI performance.
Her background of 26 years as a nurse led her to join the CDI field six years ago, and she has become a passionate advocate of CDI education since.
While everyone on her team is medically licensed, they have all had different bedside experiences. She wants to make sure that they are given enough guidance and education in various specialties for continued professional education. This not only benefits them professionally but also improves patient care.
Kalena shares that in the fairly new, evolving field of CDI, it is challenging to get everyone on staff on board with the idea that CDI is beneficial.
7:57 “I think it’s transitioning and making sure that executive leadership understands transitioning CDI, which typically, at most facilities or health systems report under revenue cycle side, but we’re transitioning more to quality focuses.”
CDI brings improvement on both the financial and patient-outcome fronts. To put it simply, it helps you show your work. CDI helps capture the complexity and severity of the patient, and capture how hard providers are working and everything they are doing for that patient. The more accurate this picture is, the better, for facilities, providers, and patients.
12:47 “We never want to lose sight that yeah it was originally a fiscally generated… concept, but when we get an accurate record, everything follows... We don’t want to just focus on money.”
In the future, Kalena hopes to see CDI implemented in more outpatient centers and see healthcare payment methods shift towards a pay for performance rather than pay for procedures model.
Kalena focuses and works closely with the billing departments at her facilities to see how much of revenue improvement and quality improvement can be attributed to CDI efforts. This is not easy, but with collaboration, this may help move the needle toward more accurate payment models that value quality.
She shares the example of one hospital that saw their mortality rate increase when CDI was implemented. This pointed to the staff’s documentation of the health of their patients. Once Kalena educated providers on how to capture more accurate documentation of their severity of illness, the hospital’s overall percentage improved.
19:19 “The mortality index is less than one and continues to decrease. And it’s really been about my CDI teams providing education to providers about why they’re getting queries and about why we need to have the most accurate clinical documentation.”
CDI captures the accurate picture of all of the efforts a facility puts in to help patients be well, which benefits everyone involved.
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