July 2, 2025

In the healthcare industry, key performance indicators (KPI) and data analysis are critical to ensuring organizations stay on track to meet strategic goals. As one comprehensive case study shows, analyzing the right KPIs and effectively communicating them to other stakeholders can help create trusted healthcare benchmarks, emphasize the value of the health information management department, and develop staff pride in their performance. 

In fact, KPIs can help organizations measure and improve the quality of care delivered, while providing key insights for boosting revenue integrity, operational efficiency, and so much more.  

But determining what kind of data to collect can be difficult for many organizations, particularly amid staffing challenges and fast-paced environments. Here are 11 well-defined performance measures that every health information management department should monitor. 

1. Data Accuracy and Completeness 

This metric accounts for the percentage of errors or incomplete data present in patient records. Data accuracy KPIs could include the frequency of patient name misspellings, date of birth transpositions, or missing addresses.  

Why It Matters

Accurate and complete data contributes to robust data analytics and accurate coding for healthcare. It also helps prevent duplicate records and enables efficient health information exchange (HIE). Errors and omissions — particularly those that can occur during data migration, as discussed in a blog on the Olah website — may lead to inaccurate conclusions, mistrust, and poorly informed decisions. 

2. Data Accessibility and Availability 

Data accessibility refers to the amount of time it takes for a provider or staff member to access data — including legacy data — in the electronic health record (EHR). Examples of this metric include the time it takes to access data, the data request success rate, the data discoverability score, metadata completeness, platform uptime, and EHR time per patient. 

Why It Matters

Data accessibility is a critical metric that can help an organization identify lag time or bottlenecks that impact providers’ ability to spend quality time with their patients. Promoting efficient access to EHR data, including archived data, at the point of care supports patient safety and high-quality patient care.

3. Turnaround Time for Information Requests 

Turnaround time accounts for the amount of time it takes a covered entity — or a business associate working on its behalf — to share information in the EHR with individuals or their personal representatives.  

By law, covered entities must provide access to protected health information (PHI) within 30 calendar days from receiving the individual’s request. This metric helps an organization evaluate whether they’re meeting that requirement or not. It can also include the average turnaround time for data requests, first response time, or response time service level agreement compliance. 

Why It Matters

Providers can be fined for not complying with timely access requirements under HIPAA. Providing individuals with easy access to their health information empowers them to be more in control of decisions related to their health and well-being. Timely responses are also important in terms of maintaining positive patient relationships.   

4. Medical Coding Accuracy 

This metric helps organizations evaluate the percentage of incorrectly coded diagnoses and procedures, which can impact both revenue cycle management and patient care. This category of KPIs includes each department’s coding accuracy rate, coding error rate, correct DRG rate, audit pass rate, and denial rate due to coding. 

Why It Matters

Coding for healthcare requires precision. Coded data drives clinical care, payment, research, and more. It’s important to assign accurate and complete medical codes to promote data and revenue integrity.  

5. Regulatory Standards Compliance

For operational and finance teams, this metric is particularly critical. It accounts for the number of errors resulting in fees, HIPAA violations, or regulatory violations. That could include the number of data breaches reported, medication error rate, or the frequency of overbilling incidents. 

Why It Matters

Over time, healthcare regulatory compliance fees and violations create an enormous financial burden. They can also jeopardize patient safety and cause reputational harm. This KPI can help organizations identify and rectify costly errors related to federal, state, or local regulations to preserve revenue integrity. 

6. Patient Privacy and Data Security Incident Rate 

Patient privacy is crucial not only to protecting patients as they move through the healthcare system but also to avoiding costly, disruptive, and time-consuming noncompliance situations. This KPI focuses on the number of attempted and/or successful data breaches over a specific period, which can include metrics such as incident rate, time to detect, time to respond, volume of data exposed, or policy violation rate. 

Why It Matters

Monitoring these metrics helps healthcare organizations avoid costly data breaches that may require compliance with breach notification requirements, participation in a resolution agreement with the Office for Civil Rights, and payment of a civil monetary penalty. These KPIs help ensure data protection, compliance, and operational stability. 

7. Record Retention Compliance 

Record retention compliance refers to the number of times a hospital doesn’t adhere to state-specific record retention guidelines. Metrics under this category could include retention compliance rate, the volume of records past retention, record retention audit findings, and user adherence rate. 

Why It Matters

Retaining records according to state requirements is important for legal compliance, such as in the event of an investigation, audit, or lawsuit. It can also be crucial for continuity of care, public health and research, and healthcare regulatory compliance with patient access requirements. Monitoring relevant health information management department KPIs ensures organizations can provide the best possible patient care and defend themselves in legal matters.   

8. EHR Utilization Rate 

EHR utilization rate is the number of individual organizations or staff members who use the systemwide EHR for their work. There are several metrics under this category, including EHR log-in frequency (especially during patient visits), chart completion time, note completion rate, inbox management time, clinical decision support engagement, order entry rate, and use of templates or smart phrases.  

Why It Matters

These metrics help healthcare organizations pinpoint areas for EHR enhancements to ease the burden on physicians and improve patient care. They also ensure providers can use EHRs for patient care coordination, operational efficiency, and healthcare regulatory compliance.  

9. Medical Chart Abstraction Timeliness 

Providers and staff need efficient ways to access data, as tracking information down manually can be time-consuming. This KPI accounts for the amount of time it takes for a staff member to extract specific data from a medical record.  

Examples of this metric category include turnaround time from chart availability to completion of abstraction, medical chart abstraction completeness rate, medical chart abstraction accuracy rate, medical chart abstraction error rate, and charts abstracted per hour or day. 

Why It Matters

Monitoring these KPIs helps healthcare organizations promote timely clinical decision making, billing, and data submission. It also helps organizations track health outcomes, identify trends for improvement, and support population health efforts. 

10. Cost per Medical Record Processed 

This finance-oriented KPI is the dollar amount per record associated with ensuring payment for services rendered. It includes several key metrics, including the cost to collect, the total cost of collections, and the total cash collected. 

Why It Matters

These health information management department KPIs are important because they measure the efficiency of a healthcare organization in collecting the money it’s owed. By analyzing this data, organizations can identify where they might be losing money to inefficiencies or errors. 

11. Revenue Cycle Efficiency 

While there are a number of KPIs related to revenue, this one focuses on how quickly a healthcare organization can collect money owed. In short, it measures an organization’s financial efficiency and cash flow. Specific metrics under this category include accounts receivable days, write-off rate, net collection rate, claim denial rate, first pass resolution rate, bad debt rate, and patient collections. 

Why It Matters

Revenue cycle management is critical to any healthcare organization, as it can impact the organization’s ability to retain staff, effectively care for patients, and maintain financial sustainability. Monitoring these KPIs helps healthcare organizations pinpoint areas for revenue cycle improvement that can enhance cash flow and promote long-term financial stability.  

Leveraging Health Information Management To Support Data Efforts 

Tracking the right KPIs helps maintain the efficiency, security, and profitability of a healthcare organization. Poor data quality, subpar data protection, and data inaccessibility undermine efforts to improve performance.  

That’s why it’s important for health information management departments to set the stage for success. Regularly monitoring and analyzing the right KPIs can improve care, enhance operational efficiency, and ensure compliance with healthcare regulations. Working with a strategic partner like Verisma can help you zero in on how to identify and use insights from that information to improve your HIM operations. Contact us today to learn more.  

May 21, 2025

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.