I think the future of HIM professionals with health information
exchange systems will change the traditional professional role of
HIM directors. With the implementation of health exchange
networks, the HIM profession is branching off into new job areas of
healthcare. Not only will future HIM professionals oversee policies
and processes relating to information management, but future job
includes various other departments like IT, compliance, revenue
cycle, business systems analyst and financial data analyst. With the
training of HIM professionals working in these key areas of
healthcare, there would be an increase in accuracy in data collected
versus accuracy of data collected. This is important as the future of
healthcare will involve more technology. Although integrating
technology into healthcare will benefit a lot of patients, there are
added barriers to implementing health information exchange
networks. A key piece is ensuring data integrity and security is met.
With more technology there are more data hackers, and the more
patient data is collected within one system, the higher the risk is to
keep that information secured. Another barrier will be participation
and getting all healthcare organizations to participate and have free
flowing information and keeping it secure.
To increase the job performance improvements, HIM professionals
have already been adapting a lot to the changes, change
management, and what changes require to help with executing the
new technologies and new terminologies and classifications. I think
that HIM professionalism demands progressive strengthening of the
policy frameworks for information management, HIM skills,
documentation, team collaboration techniques, etc. to be able to use
the clinical analytics and healthcare financing and payment system to
support the overall quality of care and cost in the healthcare industry
in favour of the healthcare providers and patients’ satisfaction. I
think that the focus of HIM should be to adapt and optimize of the
code classifications and usage of the vocabularies and terminologies
parallel with the evolving payment system to better transit the health
information, patients’ information, and records with the third parties,
and payers, etc. by following all the local and federal policies to avoid
any jeopardy in the safety, security, and integrity of the health care
data.
