May 21, 2025

As today’s hospital leaders look for ways to effectively manage healthcare data, they’re increasingly turning to health information management (HIM) professionals for valuable insights. As stewards of patient health information (PHI) and data, these professionals are often responsible for managing data from end to end, including collecting, storing, and sharing it with the organization. 

As a health information management professional, you possess technical and analytical skills that enable you to play a critical role in protecting data, ensuring its accuracy so your organization can use it effectively, and streamlining workflows so stakeholders from clinicians to administrative staff have the information they need, when they need it. 

But while your reach can be extensive, focusing on key priorities can help you maximize your impact. Here’s a look at seven ways you can best support your health system.  

1. Provide Leaders With Accurate Data for Decision-Making 

Health information management professionals are well-positioned to validate and interpret patient data because they understand why and how it’s captured.  

You and your team recognize how clinical documentation translates to the coded data necessary for clinical decision support, operational efficiency, financial management, population health management, and treatment personalization.  

By providing organized, accessible data to your organization, you can help transform how teams interpret and apply that information. Armed with accurate and complete data, hospital leaders, clinicians, and others can identify patterns, uncover insights, and make evidence-based decisions to drive better patient outcomes.  

2. Evaluate AI-Driven Solutions for Efficiency and Cost Effectiveness 

HIM professionals assist hospital leaders in balancing innovation with budget constraints. Not every new project or technology is cost effective, nor is it right for every organization. But by understanding vendor offerings and leveraging data to evaluate the return on investment (ROI) of new technologies — including clinical information systems — you can help your leaders make the right investments at the right time. 

For instance, you can provide financial data to ensure that expenditures on clinical data management software and other artificial intelligence (AI)-driven solutions align with business objectives. Or you can help measure the potential impact of these solutions on patient care and operational efficiency. Using your health information management skills, you can explore cost-effective clinical data management software solutions and establish metrics to monitor ongoing performance.  

3. Streamline Real-Time End-User PHI Access 

Individuals with health information management skills help organizations implement systems that improve immediate access to personal health information (PHI), which can help boost clinical and operational outcomes, according to the American Hospital Association. 

Your team’s extensive experience with clinical and administrative workflows — coupled with their knowledge of HIPAA regulations — makes them ideal experts to reduce bottlenecks in data retrieval and ensure data accessibility that doesn’t compromise security.  

When exploring different clinical information systems, for example, your team of health information management professionals can ensure the system chosen displays relevant data that clinicians need to assess and treat each patient on a single, customizable dashboard. Similarly, you and your team know the warning signs of when it’s time to archive EHR data and can sound the alarms before a lack of access to healthcare data becomes problematic. 

4. Increase Interoperability  

Integrating different healthcare systems and software can be challenging for any healthcare organization. But with extensive knowledge of standardized data formats and communication protocols, health information management professionals can help organizations overcome these difficulties. 

Your team specializes in data exchange procedures, which is critical for any technology integration. As such, you can improve data exchange between departments and external providers by advocating for the adoption of technology that uses universal data standards (e.g., Health Level 7, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources, and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine standards) and application programming interfaces (APIs).  

You can also help ensure your organization complies with government regulations to enforce interoperability. With interoperable systems, your organization can communicate, share, and use patient data efficiently across various platforms to coordinate care, promote patient safety, enhance operational efficiency, and increase patient engagement.   

5. Keep Pace With New Security Standards and Regulations 

As health information management professionals, it’s you and your team’s responsibility to stay on top of ever-evolving data management compliance requirements. That expertise puts you in the perfect position to quickly identify best practices for protecting patient data from breaches and cyber threats, including ransomware, insider threats, device and network vulnerabilities, and cloud security risks.  

These best practices include: 

• Archiving data in legacy systems
• Implementing strong access controls
  
• Ensuring data encryption
  
• Performing security audits and vulnerability assessments
  
• Creating backup and disaster recovery plans
  
• Providing employee training and security awareness programs 

As HIPAA experts, your team can also help prepare your organization for proposed HIPAA changes that include enhanced PHI access for patients, new cybersecurity standards, and more. 

6. Ensure Accurate Documentation to Support Better Care and Outcomes  

Accurate data is crucial to not only making informed decisions, but also enhancing billing, compliance, and quality reporting. Health information management professionals play a key role in educating physicians and staff about best practices for keeping data accurate and up to date.  

For example, implementing guardrails such as real-time data validation, automated data cleansing tools, and machine learning anomaly-detection tools can help you reduce documentation errors that impact patient care in your organization. 

By employing your health information management skills, you can help mitigate the risks of incomplete data, duplicate records, and outdated information, as well as leverage technologies like templates, AI tools, and physician-assisted documentation to improve documentation efficiency.  

7. Understand End Users’ Needs and Concerns 

Possessing keen insights into administrative and clinical information systems, your team of health information management professionals can easily identify pain points in existing or new applications and engage clinicians and administrative staff to improve workflows.  

Consider identifying and implementing strategies to streamline and automate manual administrative tasks, such as: 

• Helping your organization go paperless to automate clinical and administrative workflow bottlenecks 
• Capturing clinical and administrative data prior to appointments 
• Leveraging AI to reduce the physician clinical documentation burden 
• Ensuring clinical decision support systems integrate into the clinician’s workflow 

By providing training and support focused on technical skills and change management strategies, you can also ensure smooth technology adoption. 

Other important contributions? Your team can provide valuable end-user insights during legacy data migration projects and ask important operational questions when converting and transferring healthcare data from one system to another to ensure success.  

The Foundation for Better Data Management 

Health information management professionals are more than data managers. They’re regulatory experts, decision-making guides, documentation optimizers, and so much more.  

By prioritizing the key areas that make the biggest impact on your organization, you can help leaders successfully manage the data lifecycle. 

Learn how Verisma’s data archiving solution, Olah™, can augment these efforts, providing a new and better way to archive and access legacy health information.