Health Information Management/Technology & Informatics

What Is Health Information Management/Technology & Informatics?

The Health Information field involves the collection, storage, analyzing, and protecting of health data to improve patient outcome.  This includes paper-based data as well as electronic data. The challenge of this field is documenting complex patient care delivered at numerous facilities in a way that the data can be used in an ethical way.  Some professionals in the field design the systems, some collect, maintain, and analyze the data, and some develop health policies based on findings.  As you can imagine, the data can help in studies of causes and effects of various illnesses.  Informatics is a sub-field that involves more complex computer systems that can do intricate analyses of many sources of data.

Some people in the field code complex data for storage, some design systems, some write policies, and some do very complicated computer science work.  Do you like working with data?  Are you good at keeping records?  Are you a computer whiz?  There may be something in this field of interest to you.   Jobs include Director of Health Information Systems, HIM Coordinator, Records and Information Management Specialist, Health Information Management Coder, Coder Supervisor, and Information Coordinator.