Note from the Director of Programming: Check out the 2024 ACDIS conference agenda

by Rebecca Hendren

2024 is upon us! Well, that’s how it feels to the ACDIS team at least.

I’ve written before that the national conference feels like the end of the ACDIS year and that a new year begins immediately after the conference concludes. Which means, with the 2023 conference in the rearview mirror, we’re ready for a big ACDIS holiday: the 2024 ACDIS agenda has been released! I invite you to take a look here.

I want to take a moment to acknowledge our incredible CDI community for a minute. We received more speaker submissions than we ever have before—and the quality of submissions was incredible. I am in awe of the people who put so much time and effort into crafting thoughtful, practical proposals to share their knowledge with others so that together we can lift up the profession.

This is really what ACDIS has always been about: The sharing of our knowledge so we can collectively grow together. The 2024 agenda has a huge number of topics to help you grow. Whether you’re looking to keep up with clinical and coding updates or looking for professional development sessions that will equip you with new skills, you can find it all.

Hot topics on the 2024 agenda include:

• The latest clinical topics, including sepsis, encephalopathy, malnutrition, and social determinants of health codes
• Strategies for CDI and utilization review/management collaboration
• Professional development topics including leveraging power dynamics, mentoring, retention, emotional intelligence, and green flags for leaders
• 2024 hierarchical condition category changes, patient safety indicators, and CDI compliance
• A whole track focused on denials, including proactive denials prevention, using clinical guidelines to minimize denials, analyzing case mix index for the C-suite, and data-driven second level reviews
• Pediatric topics including behavioral health, length of stay and mortality, critical illness, and obstetrics
• Expansion topics including CDI at Veterans Administration hospitals, beginning outpatient CDI, and high- and low-tech CDI solutions

I need to thank the fabulous volunteers on this year’s Event Committee who spent hours reading through these topics, discussing them, and making so many difficult decisions. We had more than 220 excellent presentations that had to somehow be fit into 48 slots on the agenda. It was not an easy task.

They also worked their magic to create an interesting and engaging agenda for the ACDIS Symposium: Outpatient CDI. You can view that here. This year we’re adding a second track to Day 2, which gives us an opportunity to get even deeper into the topics.

The agenda for the ACDIS Physician Advisor Forum has also been released. Check out this year’s speakers here. This wonderful event is continuing the practice of offering two tracks on the first day. One is for physician advisors who are new to the role or new to CDI. This track, taught by industry veteran Trey La Charité, MD, FACP, SFHM, CCS, CCDS, is a perfect boot camp-type day to cover everything you need to know. The second track features a variety of speakers who share their program success. And Day 2 brings everyone back together for learning and networking.

We’re proud of these agendas and can’t wait to be onsite next April with all of you!

Editor’s note: Hendren is the director of programming for ACDIS. Contact her at rhendren@acdis.org.