ACDIS update: What’s so special about ACDIS?
Note from Rebecca Hendren, ACDIS director of programming: The following was penned by Melissa Varnavas, ACDIS’ editorial director, for the 10th anniversary of ACDIS. Melissa was the heart and soul of the ACDIS team from the time she joined in October 2008 until her death in August 2022. I share her article because she perfectly captured the essence of our community, and her words are as meaningful now as they were five years ago. Please enjoy.
What makes ACDIS unique? In short, it’s the membership. There are more than 5,500 ACDIS members now as we celebrate our 10th anniversary. That’s the size of a city. Sure, it’s not a large city, but it’s definitely a community—one whose members have chosen to live and work together and ensure their neighbors succeed. And that’s an amazing thing to be a part of.
But it’s been that way since the start of the organization. Back then, everyone was scrambling to figure out the best way to do this job. Everyone was looking for the best clinical indicators to help win their physicians over. And everyone was struggling to find their niche within the hospital hierarchy of department reporting structures. So everyone shared. Everyone shared just about everything they possibly could. They shared their time, first and foremost, in serving on a think tank, then an advisory committee, then an advisory board. Volunteers also met regularly to design the shape and scope of the organization and dedicated themselves to seeing the project through to fruition.
In the first few months of ACDIS’ existence, no one really knew what to expect from the fledgling association. At the time, managing editor Brian Murphy took on the mantle of director and began holding conference calls with a hand-selected board of trusted advisors and new CDI specialists.
The professionals he reached out to lamented the lack of information available for their unique position. CDI specialists didn’t fall easily into the coding ranks, and specialists who hailed from nursing could no longer consider themselves part of the direct patient care process. The need for guidance and orthodoxy was clear, and these individuals threw themselves into the association’s creation with gusto.
Although a small band at the start, ACDIS’ members seemingly doubled every month. Donations came pouring in for the Forms & Tools Library—smatterings of sample queries, jumbles of policies, thoughtful collections of processes, and sample job descriptions. Murphy published quarterly newsletters and biweekly email digests to start. He held conference calls for members, where CDI professionals asked questions of the Advisory Board and each other.
It was a dialogue that continued via the ACDIS Forum (then the CDI Talk listserv). Members discussed strategies for dealing with noncompliant physicians and offered up their hard work—in the form of CDI newsletters, policies, tip cards, and queries—as samples that others could adapt and use as their own. Many of those founding ACDIS members continue to be instrumental in the ongoing strength and progress of the CDI profession—advocating for CDI in their systems, promoting the value of CDI within ancillary departments, mentoring new CDI professionals, and even letting their actual geographic communities know about how valuable CDI programs are to the patients they serve. For example, the CDI team at Claxton-Hepburn Medical Center in Ogdensburg, New York, notified their local newspaper about CDI Week this year.
In the early days, when Murphy asked members to share their success stories, they did—and they still do. In our very first edition of the CDI Journal, Judy Ostrow, RN, BSN, CDI manager at St. Luke’s Episcopal Hospital in Houston, offered an inside look at her year-old CDI program. The team’s overall goal was to get the physicians to document with greater specificity. “If they were treating the patient, we wanted to make sure the documentation showed the true picture of what was going on,” Ostrow said.
In the second issue of the CDI Journal, Lena Wilson, RHIA, CCS, at the time CDI manager for Indianapolis-based Clarian Health, volunteered her experience in pushing the program’s focus beyond CC/MCC capture and moving the case-mix index into more capture of disease severity and quality of care.
It’s a theme that’s continued throughout the past decade to today. In the September 2017 edition of the CDI Journal, Aimee Van Balen, RN, BSN, CCDS, senior clinical documentation specialist at Lifespan in Providence, Rhode Island said that “every hospital system should want their patients to look and reflect an accurate picture of their risk and severity.”
And it’s a mission we’ve undertaken as a community. Through our conversations within the various platforms that the larger association interacts in—from the Journal to the email newsletter CDI Strategies, from the ACDIS Forum to social media, from local chapter events to the national conference and symposiums, from the resource library to surveys, white papers, and position papers, from quarterly conference calls to ACDIS Radio programs—we have grown collectively and continued to strive to meet the needs of that community.
I am always astounded to realize just how many ACDIS members I personally call friends and how much of this ongoing CDI story we’ve shared together. Some have worked with me to start local chapters, others have been featured in articles, and still others have helped develop books that have become staple texts for professionals across the country. We are genuinely concerned about each other; we share baby pictures and vacation stories. When we meet at the annual conference, it’s like gathering for a reunion. We hug. And when it’s time to depart a few short days later, we hug again.
I could go on and on, and hopefully will, as we step out from our revelry and reminiscences during our 10th anniversary year and step forward into all the continuing challenges and opportunities facing us. It is an exciting time to be a part of this amazing profession. I look forward to many more years of comradery, growth, and experiences with all of you.
You are ACDIS, and you are amazing. You are what makes this organization strong, unique, and special. Thank you for these past 10 years.