Clinical documentation is at the core of every patient encounter. In order to be meaningful, the documentation must be clear, consistent, complete, precise, reliable, timely, and legible to accurately reflect the patient’s disease burden and scope of services provided. 

Successful clinical documentation integrity (CDI) programs facilitate the accurate representation of a patient’s clinical status that translates into coded data. Coded data is then translated into quality reporting, physician report cards, reimbursement, public health data, disease tracking and trending, and medical research. 

The convergence of clinical care, documentation, and coding processes is vital to appropriate reimbursement, accurate quality scores, and informed decision-making to support high-quality patient care. To that end, CDI has a direct impact on patient care by providing information to all members of the care team as well as those who may be treating the patient at a later date.