Association of Clinical Documentation Improvement Specialists Annual Conference 2027

Joan Peterson is vice president, master facilitator, and leadership coach at BluePoint Leadership Development, a Simplify Compliance brand. She is a highly skilled facilitator and coach with over 15 years of hands-on experience working with leaders at all levels and in many different industries. She is noted for her passion for what she does and for her energetic and interactive facilitation style. Her feedback typically includes the words: engaging, excellent, enthusiastic, informative, and professional. She is equally adept at working with front line emerging leaders as she is with executive teams. Joan is noted for her unique workshop design and delivers measurable results by inspiring participants to build on their strengths to improve their bottom line results. Her growing renown as a facilitator is equaled by her growing reputation as a thought leader and a respected authority on what it takes to deliver a learning experience that will last the test of time. Her areas of expertise include helping organizations, teams, and individuals understand how to lift the performance of others, how to improve team execution by way of innovation and creativity, and how to create an aligned and engaged organization that is primed to deliver on its vision.

Our day 2 general session will be a presentation by Christopher G. Bresette, CPA, Assistant Regional Inspector General for Audit Services, Office of Inspector General. Bresette was involved with a recent audit of particular interest to attendees of the ACDIS Symposium: Outpatient CDI. The report is entitled “Some diagnosis codes that Essence Healthcare, Inc., submitted to CMS did not comply with federal requirements.” You can find it here. In this audit the OIG reviewed a Medicare Advantage organization, Essence Healthcare, Inc. (Essence), and focused on two areas that included high-risk diagnosis codes. Its objective was to determine whether selected diagnosis codes that Essence submitted to CMS for use in CMS’s risk adjustment program complied with Federal requirements. The OIG selected 218 unique enrollee-years with high-risk diagnosis codes during calendar years 2012 through 2014. The 218 enrollee-years included 52 diagnoses of acute stroke and 166 diagnoses of major depressive disorder. It determined that Essence received $158,904 of overpayments.

Mitchell M. Levy, MD, MCCM, FCCP, is chief, division of pulmonary, critical care, and sleep medicine, department of medicine, The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University, where he is professor of medicine. He is also serves as medical director of the medical ICU at Rhode Island Hospital. He has been an investigator on numerous pharmacologic and biologic trials intended to treat sepsis, cardiovascular and pulmonary pathology. He has expertise in trial design, clinical trial execution and trial management and is one of the three founding members of the Surviving Sepsis Campaign (SSC). Dr. Levy is past-president of the Society of Critical Care Medicine (2009). Dr. Levy’s current research interests include implementation science in sepsis, clinical trials in sepsis, biomarkers, and end-of-life care in the ICU. He authored over 200 peer-reviewed articles and 25 book chapters. He is the co-director of the Ocean State Clinical Coordinating Center, which manages large, international, multi-center clinical trials in sepsis. Dr. Levy is very active in the field of quality and safety, and has worked on several state-wide initiatives on quality, including New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Colorado, and New Jersey. He advises the New York Department of Health Sepsis Initiative and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) SEP-1 Measure Program.

Employing storytelling, humor and impromptu songs on his guitar, including the wild mix of a Led Zeppelin tune with Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham lyrics and an original twist on Taylor Swift’s You Belong With Me, he kept his audience engaged while serving up a deeper message—to never be satisfied with ‘what is,’ to always ask ‘what if?’

On February 14, 2014, Noelle Pikus Pace crossed the finish line at the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia and finally earned an Olympic medal- but it wasn’t an easy road. She learned through her trials the importance of setting specific goals each and every day in an effort to progress forward. After a terrible crash in Germany, she realized the importance of eliminating doubts, fears and worries within our daily lives and that where you look is where you’ll go. Noelle will undoubtably make you laugh as she shares this story and applies it to life. The audience will walk away, recognizing that it is those small decisions we make daily that will shape our habits and who we will inevitably become.

Brian is the Head of Learning & Leadership for the global bank, Citi, across it's 55 country locations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He leads a team of learning and performance consultants who facilitate learning experiences which drive individual, leadership and organisational performance. Brian also leads global efforts to develop a culture of continuous workplace learning across Citi’s 200,000 employees in over 100 countries. In 1999 Brian started his career with Citi in Ireland before moving to the UK. He has held a series of regional HR Director roles where he has led the HR function for various banking divisions within Citigroup. Brian believes passionately that the L&D profession is at a historical crossroads as the world of work continues to change rapidly. It can choose a traditional approach which is increasingly irrelevant to the ‘real work’, or it can become a key enabler for business performance, innovation and change. Brian is a Chartered Fellow of the CIPD and a Fellow of the Learning & Performance Institute.