Note from the Associate Editorial Director: Conference updates

By Melissa Varnavas

It was so amazing to be back at the Hilton at Disney Springs in Orlando last week for the ACDIS Symposium: Outpatient CDI. I say “back” because ACDIS held its 2011 conference at the hotel. I remember the event so vividly. It was the first year we asked attendees to wear purple and orange on Day 1 of the event and the hallway leading to the exhibit hall and educational sessions was bright with those colors.

The Symposium lived up to its name—more intimate and focused than our national event but full of innovation and education. I spoke with so many interesting professionals doing inventive work in the outpatient arena in the name of documentation improvement. Khyrsis Gonzalez Perez told me about her work in Puerto Rico with Vita Care and Rachel Peigh from California and I explored the difficulties in navigating the different rules governing evaluation and management code assignment. We both wondered what in the world will happen next with E/M and its own “wild west.”

As soon as I returned, however, I turned my attention to the future and the May 2019 ACDIS Conference. The call for speaker proposals went out in August and more than 170 submissions came in response. Since mid-September, the Conference Committee and Advisory Board liaisons have reviewed and ranked the submissions, discussed and debated each one on its own merits and compared like sessions with those of similar themes whittling down the applications to just over 60 final selections.

Those chosen speakers were congratulated just this week. Those who unfortunately were passed over for the ACDIS national stage were invited to share their stories of challenge and success with the CDI community through the CDI Journal, ACDIS Radio, or poster presentations. We expect to have the full agenda ready for everyone by early December.

Within the next few weeks, we’ll be opening the call for poster presentations to the wider community and we’ll also be opening the call for ACDIS Achievement Award nominations. So, we hope you’ll consider getting involved and offering your experiences in this manner as well.

If you were among the more than 200 CDI professionals who joined us for the Outpatient Symposium, we’re so glad you could make it and we look forward to hearing how you put the lessons you learned there to good use.

If you have any questions about the upcoming May event, email me or click here.

Editor’s note: Varnavas is the associate editorial director of ACDIS. Contact her at mvarnavas@acdis.org.