Health information management (HIM) is the practice of acquiring, analyzing, and protecting the medical information that healthcare organizations rely on to treat patients, get paid, and comply with the law. It sits at the intersection of business, clinical care, and information technology. If you’ve ever had a doctor pull up your medical history on a screen, received an insurance bill with procedure codes, or signed a privacy notice at a clinic, HIM professionals were behind the systems and processes that made all of that work.
What HIM Professionals Actually Do
The simplest way to understand HIM is through its three core pillars: clinical data, information technology, and management. Clinical data includes everything captured during diagnosis and treatment, from lab results to physician notes to imaging reports. Information technology covers the systems that store and move that data, whether paper forms, databases, or electronic health records. Management ties it all together, ensuring the right people have the right access to the right information at the right time.
On a day-to-day level, HIM work spans a wide range of tasks. Clinical coding is one of the most visible: translating a physician’s documentation into standardized diagnosis and procedure codes that drive billing, reporting, and research. Revenue cycle management ensures that hospitals and clinics get reimbursed correctly for the care they provide. Data quality governance means reviewing records for accuracy, completeness, and consistency so that clinical decisions are based on reliable information. At higher levels, HIM professionals manage teams, sit on administrative committees, prepare budgets, and shape organizational policy around how patient data is handled.
Privacy, Security, and Legal Compliance
Protecting patient information is a central responsibility in HIM. Federal law requires healthcare organizations to put administrative, physical, and technical safeguards in place to secure electronic protected health information. That includes performing thorough risk assessments, implementing access controls so only authorized staff can view records, and maintaining policies for breach notification if something goes wrong.
HIM professionals are often the ones designing and enforcing these policies. They determine who within an organization needs access to what data, how long records must be retained, how information is released to patients or third parties, and how the organization stays in compliance with federal privacy and security regulations. This legal and compliance expertise is one of the things that distinguishes HIM from purely technical IT roles.
HIM vs. Health Informatics
These two fields overlap enough to cause confusion, but they have different focal points. HIM professionals manage the data itself: they master health data content from the moment it’s created, including patient registration, insurance details, legal consents, and clinical documentation. They analyze and classify patient encounters from coding, compliance, and reporting perspectives. Their expertise leans toward business, finance, and regulatory requirements.
Health informatics professionals focus more on the technologies and systems that make health information management possible. They tend to have stronger backgrounds in computer science and specialize in building infrastructure, monitoring large-scale data, and improving clinical decision-making through technology. Think of HIM as managing what’s inside the system, and informatics as building and optimizing the system itself. In practice, the two fields collaborate closely, with HIM bringing coding and compliance knowledge and informatics contributing technical design and implementation skills.
How AI Is Changing the Field
Automation is reshaping HIM work, particularly in medical coding. Computer-assisted coding tools use natural language processing to read clinical documentation and suggest applicable diagnosis and procedure codes. One market research report estimated that as much as 88% of medical coding in physician offices for billing purposes could eventually occur automatically without human review. As machine learning improves, these tools will handle increasingly complex coding scenarios.
But the shift isn’t simply about replacing coders. As routine coding becomes more automated, HIM professionals are moving into data analytics roles, evaluating information related to financial performance, clinical outcomes, and operational efficiency. Natural language processing combined with voice-to-text translation is also expected to improve how organizations extract meaningful information from unstructured data like physician dictations and clinical notes. The profession is evolving toward higher-level analysis, governance, and strategy rather than manual record-by-record work.
Education and Certification
HIM education is offered at three levels: associate, bachelor’s, and master’s degrees, all accredited through the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM). An associate degree qualifies you for entry-level technical roles, while a bachelor’s or master’s opens the door to management and leadership positions.
The two primary professional credentials are the Registered Health Information Technician (RHIT) and the Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA), both offered by the American Health Information Management Association. The RHIA is the higher-level credential, designed for professionals who manage people and operational units, participate in administrative committees, and interact with clinical, financial, and information systems teams. To sit for the RHIA exam, you need at least a bachelor’s degree from a CAHIIM-accredited HIM program, though master’s degrees and post-baccalaureate certificates also qualify. Specialized certifications in areas like coding (CCS) are available for professionals who want to deepen expertise in a particular niche.
Job Outlook and Pay
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a median annual wage of $50,250 for medical records specialists as of May 2024. Employment in the field is projected to grow 7% from 2024 to 2034, which is faster than the average for all occupations. That growth is driven by an aging population generating more health data, the continued expansion of electronic health records, and increasing regulatory complexity that demands skilled professionals to manage compliance. Professionals who move into data analytics, privacy officer, or informatics-adjacent roles can expect salaries well above the median, particularly with advanced degrees and certifications.