Note from the ACDIS Director: Live from the Outpatient CDI Symposium

by Brian Murphy

If our home office in Middleton, Massachusetts, is a little slow to respond this week, it’s because we’re up to the top of our cowboy boots in outpatient CDI, at the third annual ACDIS Symposium: Outpatient CDI. My note is coming from you live from the floor of the beautiful Hyatt Regency in Austin, Texas.

ACDIS hosts just two conferences each year—our national conference, which we’ve been running since 2008, and the ACDIS Symposium: Outpatient CDI, which started in 2017.

Why the need for this second conference?

Outpatient CDI isn’t just inpatient CDI in an emergency department or clinic. It’s a different skillset, and it’s a different mindset. Outpatient CDI professionals review patient charts pre-visit. Or post-visit. Or, in some cases, not at all, but spend their time educating networks of physicians dispersed throughout their organizations. They need to understand the logic of hierarchical condition categories (HCCs), evaluation & management (E/M) documentation as well as outpatient specific-items in the Official Guidelines for Coding and Reporting; not to mention chronic disease processes and how to manage lengthy (and often inaccurate) problem lists.

Here at the Symposium, we’ll be hearing case studies of organizations that have, through the process of trial and error, implemented successful outpatient CDI programs. We’ll learn how they developed their review targets and benchmarks. We’ll listen as they describe how they staffed their programs and how they onboarded new CDI professionals. And, importantly, we’ll also learn how they are measuring success along the way.

There is no better place to be if you are in outpatient CDI or if you are a CDI professional whose organization is considering implementing outpatient CDI. Our venue and smaller numbers—we’re joined here by about 300 total attendees—makes this a very intimate event, one where it’s easy to network and make connections.

To help facilitate these connections, after sessions let out this afternoon, we’ll be mingling at a cocktail networking reception. But first comes a “lightning round” general session in which we’ve asked four presenters to deliver their best ideas in 10 minutes each, giving attendees a literal “charge” of take-home lessons. I’ll be wrangling up a few of these presenters to join me on the ACDIS Podcast later this year to give my listeners an opportunity to share some of the experiences from Austin.

Tomorrow, we have a dedicated poster session with some additional case studies and we’re honored to be hosting Christopher Bresette, assistant regional inspector general for audit services for the Office of Inspector General. Bresette will deliver a morning session that includes the result of an audit of a Medicare Advantage program that revealed high-risk diagnosis codes that did not comply with federal requirements. It’s a compliance session straight from the source.

It’s been a blast so far, and hard to believe that the ACDIS train heads home from Austin tomorrow. But we’re excited about the future of outpatient CDI and can’t wait to share what we’ve learned with you.

Editor’s note: Murphy is the director of ACDIS. Contact him at bmurphy@acdis.org.