Note from the Associate Editorial Director: Find what you’re looking for on the ACDIS website

by Linnea Archibald

Eagle-eyed visitors to the ACDIS website may have noticed that the menu across the top of the page got a major facelift earlier this week. These updates are designed to help you find what you’re looking for more easily, whether you’re an ACDIS member or not. While we hope the updates will be intuitive and user-friendly, I wanted to spend a bit of time walking you through where everything is located.

But first, a bit of background. When ACDIS launched the current iteration of the website, our membership and free offerings were significantly simpler. Over time, however, we’ve added new resource types, networking opportunities, and even events, and our menu navigation on the website has become more complicated as a result.

Every few years, we’ve carried out a few updates on the website to make navigating all these wonderful new offerings easier for our community and we were likely overdue for the larger overhaul that took place this week. Consider this your virtual tour of our new and improved navigation.

(If you’d prefer to watch a tour instead of reading one, you can also find this same information in this video.)

The first thing you’ll notice is that there are fewer menu dropdowns on the website than there were previously, and the naming conventions have changed slightly:

Let’s start by talking about the “Membership Info” section, which is the first tab in the menu.

As the title of this dropdown suggests, this is where you will find all the information about membership, including membership benefits, ACDIS’ mission and history, our code of ethics, leadership team, boards and committees, and our sponsors and partners.

We’ve also added a brand-new page all about how to get involved with the association to this section, from committee volunteer opportunities to writing for our publications to speaking at a conference or event. This is going to be your hub for all questions related to membership benefits and how the association runs.

The next section, “Certifications & Certificates,” is your go-to spot for all questions related to the CCDS and CCDS-O credentials and our four professional certificate programs—the CDI Apprenticeship, Outpatient CDI Apprenticeship, Leadership in CDI Certificate, and the CDI Educator certificate. You can also look up the status of your CCDS and CCDS-O certifications using the searchable Directory of Credential Holders.

While the first two menu dropdowns are largely the same as they were previously, the next sections contain several notable updates. Before this update, you may recall that member resources and free resources were sorted together by the type of offering (e.g., publications/articles) rather than the audience who could access it. We’ve changed that in the new redesign so that you can see at a glance what you have access to as both a member and non-member.

This third menu dropdown (“Member Resources”) contains all our members-only resources, as the title suggests. In this section, you’ll find the CDI Journal archives, our white papers that define CDI best practice and discuss industry hot topics, the archive of our members-only surveys including the CDI Salary Surveys, the quarterly conference calls, and resources donated by ACDIS members for community use like sample tip sheets, job descriptions, policies, and query templates. If you’re an ACDIS member, you can also earn CEUs from items in the CDI Journal and quarterly call sections, going back up to a year prior to earn those credits.

If you’re not an ACDIS member, the next tab is going to be your best friend because everything in the “Free Resources” tab is available to both members and non-members alike. Under this heading, you’ll find:

• The archive of all our CDI Strategies newsletter articles
• Position papers, such as the ACDIS/AHIMA Guidelines for Achieving a Compliant Query Practice brief
• The ACDIS Podcast episode archive
• Insight from ACDIS’ CDI Regulatory Committee
• CDI Week materials from all past celebrations, including every Industry Survey we’ve ever conducted
• Free webinars, reports, and surveys produced by ACDIS and in partnership with our sponsors
• Information about the ACDIS Scholarship Program

The next section, titled “Networking,” contains the link to the ACDIS Forum, information about our more than 30 local chapters and topic-based networking groups, information about the ACDIS Leadership Council, and our offerings for physician advisors. If you’re a member of the ACDIS Leadership Council currently, this is also where you will find all the resources created for you, including upcoming meeting information and the CDI Leadership Insider article archive.

Our final section, titled “Events & Products,” contains information about our in-person events such as the national conference, ACDIS Symposium: Outpatient CDI, and Physician Advisor Forum, virtual events, and paid educational offerings such as the ACDIS Pocket Guide series, ACDIS PRO online tool, PROPEL CDI, and boot camps.

You may notice that the Career Center link is no longer in the main menu, but don’t fret: you can find a link labeled “Job board” just above the search box which will take you to all the latest postings.

I also want to call your attention to the fact that each menu dropdown now has its own FAQ section answering the common quandaries related to that topic header. For example, if you have questions about the resources available to you as an ACDIS member, the FAQ section under the “Member Resources” dropdown will contain what you’re looking for.

We hope these improvements will help make ACDIS’ online home more user-friendly and intuitive for all our members and non-member friends. As always, please feel free to reach out to the ACDIS team at info@acdis.org if you have any questions.

Editor’s note: Archibald is the associate editorial director for ACDIS. Contact her at linnea.archibald@hcpro.com.