| The Health Information Management (HIM) profession is evolving to meet the technology demands of the current healthcare landscape. The 2009 enactment of the HITECH Act has placed unprecedented emphasis on utilizing technology to improve the quality of care and to decrease healthcare costs. Expectations of deep analytical skills have set the stage for HIM professionals to exert leadership in terms of infrastructure, governance, data analytics and health informatics. The adoption of health information technology is expected to increase with the arrival of big data and due to the Title XIII (HITECH Act) of the ARRA. In order to meet these goals, healthcare will need an increase in professionals with the appropriate health informatics training and data analysis skills. This study helps to identify the perceived knowledge of the emerging health informatics competencies by HIM professionals as the needs of the healthcare industry shifts to a health informatics driven era. Several categories emerged from the study that can be used to help strengthen HIM curriculum and HIM professional initiatives in the workforce. Of the identified categories, the strongest predictor of HIM competency tended to be education. Greater years of experience was also associated with greater knowledge in various HIM categories, and greater knowledge of health informatics competencies was associated with health information technology (HIT) use. |
