AHDI Conference News

Annual Conference Emphasizes Pressing Topics

By Colette Ware

This year’s Association for Healthcare Documentation Integrity (AHDI) conference at the M Resort in Las Vegas covered trending topics in health care documentation as well as those on the leading edge of health care policy. On Thursday, July 24, the opening keynote speaker, Ronald M. Wyatt, MD, MHA, of The Joint Commission set the tone for the conference, stating zero patient errors must be the goal. Wyatt was passionate and stressed that those who see something should say something. Trust, improve, and report; this is the way patient safety goals will be realized, he said.

HIPAA was a popular subject at this year’s conference. Susan Lucci, RHIA, CHPS, CHDS, AHDI-F, presented what all medical transcription service organizations and independent contractors should know about HIPAA. She reminded the audience that the Office for Civil Rights will resume HIPAA audits this fall and business associates—including individual independent contractors—must comply with HIPAA’s multiple requirements.

Cara Goodman, LMFT, and Kimberly Grettum, MS, CCLS, provided a session on the long road to recovery for burn victims detailing with the complexities of emotional and psychological wounds.

On the lighter side, Richard Lederer, PhD, provided a couple of entertaining sessions: “Conan the Grammarian,” and “Comma Sense,” which provided lessons in grammar and appropriate use of punctuation in a way that kept the audience engaged.

Later Thursday, Howard E. Cole, JD, shared “Understanding the Fair Labor Standards Act,” which touched on important facts regarding the classification of employee vs. independent contractor and overtime, minimum wage, and piecework compensation requirements.

Friday started with “The Great Debate,” a fixture at recent AHDI annual meetings. It touches on a few highly visible topics; one member makes a point and a colleague offers a counterpoint. The debate gets into high gear, with audience members weighing in. Some of this year’s topics included speech recognition and the AHDI Book of Style.

Next up was Lynn Kowalski, MD, FACOG, FACS, medical director for the Las Vegas Institute of Robotic Surgery, who discussed breakthrough successes in gynecologic surgery. Jay Vance, CMT, CHP, provided an informative talk on encryption and safeguarding computers, laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. Additional Friday afternoon highlights included a two-hour quality assurance summit cosponsored by AHIMA. This session was a focused interactive discussion on the best ways to keep health information quality a priority in patient documentation.

Saturday’s morning events included a four-hour managers and supervisors workshop sponsored by 3M. This annual session, which represents the culmination of the manager’s and supervisor’s alliance, offers educational topics specifically for health care documentation leaders. Concurrent sessions included “Evolution of the TeleScribe,” “Updates and Audits in Maternal Fetal Medicine,” and “HealtHIE Nevada: A Study in Privately Funded Health Information Exchange.”

Deborah Nolan and Darlene Castles talked about the role scribes play in today’s health care. Through their transition into this role, they shared the similarities and many differences between scribes and health care documentation specialists. Both presenters opined that health care documentation specialists are ideally suited to become scribes with appropriate additional training.

AHDI’s closing speaker was Zubin Damania, MD, aka ZDoggMD. Through humor, rap music, and storytelling, he shared some of his experiences regarding the challenges physicians face in what he calls “our severely dysfunctional medical system.” Damania has developed a groundbreaking medical model of health care delivery that is membership based, promoting wellness at the individual and community levels. This successful, albeit disruptive, approach could revolutionize how health care is provided.

— Colette Ware is transcription manager at MedScribe Information Systems.