How to become a Health Information Manager

Health Information Management is a field that cartel knowledge of healthcare processes, administration, information and human resource management to gather, examine and to electronically protect health records and data related with patient care that fulfill the medical, legal, ethical and administrative requirements of the healthcare system. The data is related to a patient’s medical history, consisting of symptoms, diagnoses, procedures, lab results, x-rays or other scans, clinical information, notes, and outcomes.

• Plan and devise health information systems like computerised patient identification systems, coding and analysis of diseases and procedures, designing health record forms, etc. for healthcare facilities
• Review and assess the efficiency of current health information record services used in healthcare facilities
• Devise and implement new policies and procedures for management of health information in harmony with professional ethics, institutional requirements, and law
• Recruit, administer, and manage employees
• Educate employees in the policies and procedures allied with the control, use and retrieval of health information
• Plan and conduct training programs
• Regulate the transmission of health records to state health departments
• Safeguarding records availability to individuals directly involved with patient’s care
• Designing, generating and analysing reports for administrators and physicians
• Managing and protecting highly sensitive, confidential patient information and records
• Coordinating and communicating between clinical, operational, and administrative departments
• Collecting, analysing, maintaining and managing accurate, complete, and organized timeline electronic health records of patients
• Implementing new standards, software, tools and technology to improve patient care
• Classifying and sorting diseases and treatments to guarantee clinical, financial and legal standardization
• Overlook the technical infrastructure of managing health information
• Handling and maintaining medical records, databases, and registries
• Track patient outcomes for quality assessment to see how a patient’s health has changed over a period of time
• Use organization software to allocate clinical codes for data analysis
• View patients health information to understand how a population’s health has changed, and understand the medical interventions that can change health outcomes
• Monitor secure databases that can only be accessed by authorized personnel
• Responsible for overseeing the process of updating, storing, and retrieving patient data.

• Health information managers must have analytical skills and be detail-oriented in order to understand and follow medical records and diagnoses, to accurately code them in a patient’s medical record. These professionals must also possess technical abilities to know how to use software for data recording.
• These individual must have high integrity and a strong sense of ethics as they work with sensitive, confidential data of patient’s records that are required, by law, to be kept protected.
• They need strong interpersonal and communication skills, both in written and spoken, to discuss patient information, inconsistencies, and data needs with doctors, patients or their caregivers, and administrative staff.