Director’s Note: ACDIS members elect four new Advisory Board members

ACDIS members recently elected four new board members in a popular vote of 10 finalists . (Read more about the elections process on the ACDIS website.) Our sincere congratulations to the following new board members who will serve a three-year term:

Donald A. Butler, RN, BSN, CDI manager, Vidant Medical Center, Greenville, N.C., has led his facility program since its implementation in 2006. He now manages the 10-member team at Vidant (a 860-bed tertiary care center serving the eastern third of North Carolina) and facilitates CDI efforts with four other individual CDI specialists at Vidant Health hospitals. His background includes 11 years as a U.S. Navy nurse with a broad variety of clinical experiences, including labor and delivery, emergency, and primary care. He also served in several leadership roles—as the department head for an obstetrics/pediatric clinic, performance improvement and accreditation coordinator—and worked on projects such as standardizing asthma and ADD care, emergency case management, and CDI. Butler continues to be actively involved with CDI through submissions to the ACDIS Blog and CDI Talk, presentations locally and nationally, and he has served on the ACDIS CDI Week development committee. His contributions earned him the 2011 CDI Professional of the Year award.

 

Sylvia Hoffman, RN, CCDS, CCDI, CDIP, President, CEO, Sylvia Hoffman CDI Consulting is an adjunct CDI Boot Camp instructor for HCPro, Inc. in Danvers, Mass. Past-president of the Florida ACDIS Chapter, she previously served as a CDI specialist in a 1,000-bed teaching hospital in Tampa, Fla., worked as an educational consultant for documentation integrity with DocuComp, LLC, and was a senior associate in the Forensic Division at KPMG, where she provided CDI education and retrospective record reviews throughout the southeast. Hoffman has 15 years acute care-hospital experience and 10 years case management experience.

 

Walter Houlihan, MBA, RHIA, CCS, Director, HIM and Clinical Documentation, Baystate Health in Springfield, Mass., has more than 30 years experience in the HIM field, initially coding medical records at Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center, in New York City (NYC) in the 1970’s, then overseeing physician documentation in medical records at academic teaching facilities in NYC and Chicago. At Baystate Health, he assisted with developing a CDI program that has improved the quality of documentation and subsequently administrative data. Baystate Health received numerous national quality awards, most notably being recognized as a top 60 medical center in the U.S. from Reuters and Leapfrog. Houlihan led the effort to prepare Baystate Health for ICD-10 and plans to start the process of dual coding of ICD-9 and ICD-10 in a few months. In addition, he has spoken at numerous conferences on the importance of improving clinical documentation and is a member of AHIMA and HIMSS.

 

James E. Vance, MD, MBA, CEO, Physician Executive Management Services, LLC, in Highlands, N.C., and  is an associate medical director for BCE Healthcare Advisors, in Clearwater, Fla. He began working in the CDI field as a physician consultant with JA Thomas and Associates (JATA) in 2003-2004. At BCE, he specializes in improving physician documentation compliance with Medicare documentation rules, and improving physician medical necessity documentation in the medical record. Vance’s experience also  includes helping to clarify medical necessity, clinical documentation “beyond the essentials,” case management physician advisor training, and third-party physician advisor training for level of care admission decisions. He has developed an “academic” CDI model and Recovery Audit appeal physician advisor training.