AHDI Conference Preview

Go All in at ACE 2014

By Heather Hogstrom

The Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity’s annual conference will take place from July 23 to 26 in Las Vegas, but attendees can rest assured that what they learn in Vegas won’t stay in Vegas. The conference provides encouragement, motivation, and inspiration for health care documentation specialists and other HIM professionals, and offers opportunities to learn about trends and discuss important issues in the health care documentation field, earn continuing education credits, meet with recruiters about employment opportunities, and visit with exhibitors to see the latest tools, technology, and services.

The sessions are divided into three categories. Clinical Medicine includes sessions such as “Medical Innovation and Documentation — A Case Study,” “Robotic Surgery in Gynecology,” and “Standing and Active Workstations: Novelty or Disruptive Technology?” Industry Trends & Technology includes sessions such as “Tech Talk With the IT Magician,” “Encryption for Dummies (and Smart People, Too!),” and “Your ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide’ to Medicine’s ‘Tower of Babel.’” Workforce Development includes sessions such as “Conan the Grammarian,” “Documentation Errors and Risk,” and “HDS to Scribe: Using Your Skills to Keep Doing What You Love!”

The opening keynote will focus on patient safety and will be given by Ronald M. Wyatt, MD, MHA, medical director of the division of healthcare improvement for The Joint Commission. Wyatt, who serves as the lead patient safety information and education resource within The Joint Commission and oversees data management and analyses related to the Sentinel Event database, will discuss The Joint Commission’s sentinel event and complaints data, including a specific case involving a transcription/speech recognition error.

Zubin Damania, MD, director of healthcare development for Downtown Project Las Vegas, will present the closing keynote on redefining the culture of health care. Damania, also known as ZDoggMD, performs stand-up comedy for medical audiences and creates humorous yet educational medical rap videos that satirize the health care system. His keynote will explore the ethical challenges of delivering compassionate health care and propose collaborative ways to revitalize it.

For more information and to register, visit www.ahdionline.org/ACE.

— Heather Hogstrom is an editorial assistant at For The Record.