The Importance of CDI In the Ambulatory Field of Healthcare

Today, we can talk with great ease about minimally invasive surgeries and technologically advanced medical procedures that do not necessarily require hospitalization. This means that a great percentage of the medical procedures are shifting into outpatient facilities. Therefore, the implementation of ambulatory CDI is now more important than ever.

Outpatient services are quite well supported by the government, through different financial incentives, and of course by patient preferences in general. Many patients opt for treatments and interventions to be carried out in outpatient facilities, without having to consider hospitalization. People started to avoid hospitals as much as possible because of the value based payment models, and they trust such care because of clinical advances and technologies that basically minimize risks and complications, and because they can get back home much faster than from a hospital. In order to manage properly and efficiently this growth of the outpatient services, proper and efficient outpatient ambulatory CDI systems represent a highly important factor.

• Diagnosis accuracy is extremely important both in inpatient and outpatient facilities.
• CDI always offers very high quality and reliable clinical documentation for reimbursement. This is an important aspect in order to receive accurate and timely reimbursement for the services provided in the outpatient system
• CDI implemented in outpatient facilities needs to be at the same quality and reliability standards as the CDI implemented in inpatient facilities
• If the outpatient CDI is regularly updated and highly accurate, this will in turn reduce the risk of payment denials.
• Outpatient CDI always ensured better coordination between the coded data and the provider documentation. When everything works in synergy, the results will be more accurate and much faster.

When the outpatient CDI is already implemented in the outpatient setting, as a next step it can be implemented in the ambulatory setting. For example, it is important to identify those areas where a CDI would prove extremely important (such as focusing on chronic conditions instead of acute ones). It is also highly important to designate a stricter definition of what needs to be accomplished through the ambulatory cdi (certain obstacles that need to be overcome, the exact sequence of the implementation, etc.).