Standing Your Ground: The Importance of Health Information Managers Sharing What They Do

Abstract

Health information management professionals have a broad range of skills that are invaluable to the health sector. The advent of the electronic health record has provided the opportunity to aggregate patient data to answer clinical and policy questions in a systematic, timely and reproducible way. The possibility of linking datasets provides greater opportunities for answering clinical and policy questions, and Health Information Managers (HIMs) have the best skill set to inform about data quality, coding and classification, privacy, security, and medicolegal implications involved in the ethical handling of such datasets. HIMs have access to a wealth of data that could improve patient care and reduce unnecessary service utilisation, and that could be used to answer many research questions. Undertaking and publishing research is an excellent avenue for HIMs to promote and strengthen their profession.