Last week Tracy Boldt contacted me to ask a question about outpatient clinical documentation integrity (CDI), and we are lucky to have her on the Talk-Ten-Tuesdays broadcast today, detailing Essentia Health’s successful outpatient CDI program. She also mentioned that she had been awaiting the third installment of my three-part series on outpatient CDI. I was embarrassed to discover that it had never been published, so we posted it last week.

This is the year of many Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) regulatory requirement changes. This includes the Merit-Based Incentive Program (MIPS), the next steps toward mandatory Authorized Use Criteria (AUC) implementation for advanced imaging, defining more explicitly what is and what is not “quality” care, etc.

The CMS on Tuesday said it will toss two bundled-payment models and cut down the number of providers required to participate in a third, citing providers' requests to have more input in the models' designs.