Bonnie Peters, CCDS, CDIP, CCS-P, CPC, CPC-H, CPC-I, has over 35 years of experience in the health care industry. Ms. Peters provides health care advisory services in clinical documentation improvement (CDI), physician professional fee coding, and auditing and physician practice management. She has served a variety of health care clients including multi-hospital systems, complex academic medical centers, large urban hospitals, and small community hospitals. She is a noted speaker and most recently spoke nationally on CDI.

Ms. Peters has implemented numerous CDI initiatives across the United States. She functioned as the senior project director for a large, multi-system hospital where she developed an innovative executive dashboard to track and measure the on-going success of the CDI. Ms. Peters designed and delivered sales presentations to potential clients. She developed proposals and project plans to target specific practice improvement initiatives. She also analyzed the clients’ historical billing data and formulated projections for their return on investment (ROI). She assessed the clients’ opportunities by reviewing concurrent and retrospective medical records to determine opportunities for improved clinical documentation and determined which type of program would work best. She developed a broad knowledge of those conditions that had potential to impact the severity of illness (SOI), risk of mortality (ROM), length of stay (LOS), and diagnosis-related group (DRG) assignment. Ms. Peters assessed the need and developed appropriate education for the C-Level administration executives, physicians, nursing staff, case management, ancillary departments (wound care, dietary, respiratory therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy, physical therapy), and inpatient coding staff. She assisted with the development of job descriptions for the clinical documentation specialists as well as the physician champions or physician liaisons.

Ms. Peters trained, mentored, and coached clinical documentation specialists (inpatient/outpatient coding professionals and RNs) on the concepts of IPPS (inpatient prospective payment system) DRG reimbursement, appropriate and compliant documentation, severity of illness, and risk of mortality in the acute care setting. She developed policies and procedures for the clients’ CDI programs. She performed data entry using a variety of software tools to accurately capture the impact of a CDI program and she reviewed the outcomes data and presented to the project managers and C-Level administration executives to ensure sustainability of their programs. Ms. Peters has experience with MS-DRGs, APR-DRGs, and AP-DRGs.

Ms. Peters has broad experience with professional fee coding, billing, and documentation. Her areas of specialization include ophthalmology, internal medicine, family practice, neurology, and surgical specialties. She provided extensive educational sessions on evaluation and management guidelines to both teaching and non-teaching physicians and their billing staff across the country. She conducted ICD-9-CM, CPT-4, and HCPCS Level II coding audits of physician practices to verify appropriate code assignment and reimbursement, and to analyze operational procedures and fee schedules. She performed compliance reviews for physicians’ practices subject to Medicare’s Teaching Physician Guidelines and provided corrective one-on-one training for physicians. She conducted emergency room coding reviews for the professional components including post-review educational sessions. She developed and assisted in the redesign of superbills/encounter forms to facilitate more efficient data capture processes. She conducted evaluation and management coding and documentation assessments for family medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, dermatology, emergency medicine, surgery, obstetrics/gynecology, gastroenterology, neonatology, ophthalmology, and pain management.
 

Education

• University of South Carolina
  B.S., Business Administration (magna cum laude), 1986

Employment History

• Navigant Consulting, Inc.
  Director
  2006 - 2011
• HP3
  Director
  2002 - 2006
• PricewaterhouseCoopers
  Senior Associate
  2000 - 2002
• QuadraMed Corporation (formerly Cabot Marsh)
  Senior Consultant
  1998 - 2000
• Health Care Consultants of America
  Senior Consultant
  1997 - 1998

Honors

• Client Service Hall of Fame
  Navigant Consulting, Inc., 2010
• Customer Satisfaction Award
  HP3, Inc., 2003
• Medical Assistant of the Year
  American Association of Medical Assistants - Catawba County Chapter, 1977
  
  

Professional Affiliations

• American Academy of Professional Coders
  CPC, CPC-H, CPC-I
• American Health Information Management Association
  CCS-P, CDIP
• New Mexico Health Information Managment Association
  CCS-P, CDIP
• American Association of Clinical Documentation Specialists
  CCDS