CDI chart review metrics: Worth tracking anymore?

By Brian Murphy

Are CDI chart review productivity metrics outdated and in need of replacing? They’ve been the same for 10 years.

(How’s that for a Monday morning shot of coffee)?

I was reviewing the CDI Week industry overview survey and found something interesting: Productivity stats have essentially stayed unchanged YOY… for ten years.

• 2025: 53% review 6-10 NEW charts daily; 28% re-review another 6-10 daily
• 2026: 58% review 6-10 NEW charts daily, 31% re-review another 6-10 daily

While this seems slightly more productive YOY at first glance, there are slightly FEWER numbers of respondents reviewing 11-15 charts than 2025. In short, a few numbers have shifted, no meaningful difference. So I went further back.

In the 2021 CDI Week survey the numbers are practically identical to 2026:

• 57% review 6-10 NEW charts daily; 32% re-review 6-10 charts daily (36% re-review 11-15 daily)

Now, let’s go back ten years, to 2016. Stats are a bit harder to dig up, but according to the 2016 ACDIS CDI Productivity Survey CDI specialists review an average of 16–24 total patient charts daily.

The TL;DR: For at least 10 years CDI professionals have averaged somewhere between 12-25 charts total (new and re-reviews) per day.

So, this raises the question: why are we still tracking productivity? A few open-ended comments reveal that not everyone does:

• We don’t have a requirement
• We measure outcomes, not productivity
• New assignment methodology has eliminated new vs. re-reviews

Technology purports to be changing the game. AI generated prompts or a coder reviewing machine generated codes seems fundamentally different from a front-to-back human read of a chart. Yet productivity hasn’t budged.

Maybe it shouldn’t.

The point of AI (we are told) is not to do more. Not to see more patients, or review more charts, but to free up people to do more high value tasks. Deeper review of more complex charts, provider and team education, data analysis, expansion into new service lines or new clinics or outpatient.

Here’s an optimistic interpretation of the survey results: People are doing new things and still maintaining the same productivity levels as before.

Maybe the new metric should be outcomes rather than charts touched. Impact over production.

I get that managers need to make sure their staff are doing the work, somehow, but charts reviewed feels like bean counting.

I don’t have the answers, just observations. And would love to know your thoughts. What do you think?

Is chart review productivity still a meaningful metric to you? Do you have a better metric to gauge staff performance? Chart coverage %? Percentage of SOI/ROM at 4/4 or other quality metric capped out? Every mortality reviewed, etc?

Send your thoughts to brian.murphy@norwood.com. I’d love to hear from you.