The essence of the health information management professional’s work is not necessarily that much different than it was at the dawn of the Internet age.
But in many ways, with so much of health reform and clinical advances supported by information technology, the profession is evolving faster than ever.
“Everything under the HIM umbrella has changed in the past 15 years,” Bonnie Cassidy, senior director of HIM Innovation at Nuance Communications and a former AHIMA president, told Government Health IT ahead of the AHIMA Convention and Exhibit, slated to take place in Atlanta Oct. 26-30.
Which is also to say it’s expanding: in some ways disrupting traditional roles from the paper-based days and in other ways creating new opportunities for professionals to not only find steady work but to increase the value they provide.
This is especially true for younger professionals starting out in the field. “They grew up with the internet. Now is time to use data in new ways,” Cassidy says.
She cited the growing importance of population health and personalized medicine — managing population data analytics for predictive modeling, risk assessment and quality reporting, and also genomic data for personalized therapies — as well as the advent of new technologies, like natural language processing.
Indeed, millennials “need to recognize that our skills are very valuable outside the traditional HIM hospital department setting,” adds Jaime James, senior director of Health Information Management Services at Banner Mesa Corporate Center, the IT center for the 23 hospital network Banner Health.
[Related: AHIMA's 6 ways to improve EHR usability.]
Not that mid-career HIM professionals should necessarily feel threatened by up-and-comers.
Younger HIM professionals who may have been in grade school when HIPAA was enacted should know that “healthcare is a highly regulated industry and understand the history of where we came in the paper world and the importance of medical records as the core business record,” Cassidy explains.
Established HIM professionals already have intimate regulatory and institutional knowledge that combined with the natural digital skills of younger workers can lead to a more productive, dynamic team.
Collaboration of course is a key principle of health reform, and health information managers are becoming the sort of central place for collaboration within health systems — and also for multi-organization care coordination, through accountable care organizations and care transitions.
“We are no longer managing health information in a single entity but across an enterprise, and even beyond as health data exchanges continue to develop,” Banner Health’s James says.
As part of assisting care teams, one area where HIM professionals may be able to find a growing role is in personalized medicine, helping clinicians manage and even understand genomics, considering that at least 40 percent of physicians feel unprepared to incorporate genomics and pharmacogenomics into their practice, according to a recent survey by the National Institutes of Health.
Genomics understanding is now one of the requirements for accreditation in Health Informatics and Health Information Management (CAHIIM).
“Traditionally HIM professionals always had to have anatomy and physiology,” Nuance’s Cassidy says. “That’s going to be even more heightened when it comes to genetic data that will be blended for analysis.”
It’s also crucial that HIM professionals know how to navigate genetic privacy as part of larger patient protections. “That’s a whole advocacy role for patient rights,” she adds.
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