2025 Compensation Best Practices Toolkit
The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) continues to provide expert guidance on compensation models in healthcare documentation. With evolving roles in both human and veterinary medicine—it is critical to ensure fair, informed, and transparent compensation practices.
As adoption of electronic health records (EHRs), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and speech recognition tools accelerates, so too does the level of risk to documentation integrity. Early assumptions that technology could fully replace documentation professionals have proven flawed, with issues like copy-paste errors and clinical inaccuracies drawing attention from regulatory bodies such as ECRI and The Joint Commission.
These changes have impacted traditional roles, created new ones, and called for a reevaluation of how professionals are compensated. Downsizing or removing skilled documentation experts has led to critical documentation errors and potential patient harm.
To support organizations through these shifts, AHDI offers the Compensation Best Practices Toolkit. This updated resource includes:
- Future-Proofing Compensation: A white paper that provides an overview of compensation change, models, and recommendations in compensation.
- Compensation Best Practices Toolkit: Explores how technology, experience, geography, and quality performance influence pay for healthcare documentation professionals. Offers insights into evolving skill demands, regional pay models, task-based structures, and linking compensation to quality assurance.
- Job Roles and Responsibilities: Defines skill levels, roles, and work settings for current, new, and future roles, including Vet Med Scribes.
- Compensation Transparency for Healthcare Documentation Professionals: Provides tips and helpful questions for both new and veteran HDPs to ask when seeking employment, to understand the compensation model by which you’re being paid.
AHDI remains committed to advancing the best practices that protect documentation integrity while supporting equitable compensation across our growing and diversifying profession.
Resources
Sample: Production by Minutes
Sample: Production by Lines
ECRI Institute’s Top 10 Patient Safety Concerns for 2025
MGMA Management and Staff Compensation Data Report for 2024
Acknowledgements
Task Force Members
Patt King, CHDS, CHDP, AHDI-F (chair)
Lauren Baldwin
Kayla Dunlap, CVHDP
Julia Dyviniak, CHDS, AHDI-F
Sheila Guston, CHDS, CHDP-A, CHDP-S, AHDI-F
Georgia Green MEd, MBA, RHIA, CCS, CCP, CHDS, AHDI-F
Stacy Lehto, CHDS, CRCR, AHDI-F
Joyce Smith, CRCR, AHDI-F
Tina Wilson, AHDI-F
Editor & Design
Kristin Wall, CHDS, CHDP, AHDI-F
