Health information management (HIM) is the practice of acquiring, analyzing, and protecting the medical information that healthcare runs on. It sits at the intersection of business, science, and information technology, touching everything from the accuracy of your medical record to whether your insurance claim gets processed correctly. If you’ve ever had a doctor pull up your chart, received an explanation of benefits from your insurer, or had records transferred between providers, HIM professionals were involved in making that happen reliably and securely.
What HIM Professionals Actually Do
The core work of health information management centers on making sure patient health records are complete, accurate, and accessible to the right people while staying protected from everyone else. That sounds straightforward, but in practice it spans a wide range of daily tasks. HIM professionals review patient records alongside nurses and other hospital staff, catching errors and filling gaps. They handle medical coding, translating diagnoses and procedures into standardized codes that determine how providers get paid by insurers, Medicare, and Medicaid. They transcribe clinician dictation on patient histories and consultation reports. And they manage access to records when they’re requested for insurance cases, lawsuits, or transfers between facilities.
A 2025 report from the HHS Office of Inspector General illustrates why this work matters so directly: hospitals failed to capture half of patient harm events among hospitalized Medicare patients. In many cases, staff didn’t consider certain outcomes to be harm, or hospitals applied narrow definitions that left events unrecorded. When harmful events go uncaptured, they can’t be investigated, and the system improvements that would prevent them from happening again never materialize. Accurate, thorough health information isn’t just an administrative concern. It’s a patient safety mechanism.
Where HIM Professionals Work
HIM roles exist well beyond hospital walls. According to Mayo Clinic, these professionals find employment in hospitals, doctors’ offices, pharmaceutical firms, insurance companies, software companies, home health agencies, nursing homes, and consulting firms. The variety reflects how many industries depend on organized, secure health data. An HIM professional at an insurance company might focus on claims processing and coding audits, while one at a software company could help design electronic health record systems. With additional education and experience, a health information manager can move into a director role or an executive position.
The Data Life Cycle
Health information doesn’t just sit in a file. It moves through a life cycle that HIM professionals oversee at every stage. That cycle begins with planning how data will be collected and organized, then moves into the actual creation and capture of records during patient encounters. From there, data gets analyzed collaboratively, with documentation at each step. Storage and security run continuously underneath all of this.
Later stages involve evaluating which records need to be retained, archiving essential information, and eventually destroying data that’s no longer needed or legally required. HIM professionals also manage how data gets shared and disseminated, whether that means sending records to another provider, supplying information for public health reporting, or making de-identified data available for research. Each stage carries its own privacy obligations and technical requirements.
Coding Standards That Drive the Field
Medical coding is one of the most visible and consequential pieces of health information management. Every diagnosis, procedure, and cause of death gets translated into a standardized code that allows health systems worldwide to communicate in a common language. The World Health Organization maintains the International Classification of Diseases, currently in its 11th revision (ICD-11), which was adopted by the World Health Assembly in 2019 and received a major update in 2025.
ICD-11 does more than label conditions. It influences whether patients receive financial protection and social insurance, since reimbursements from health insurers depend on accurate coding. The 2025 edition introduced integration with modern data exchange standards and natural language processing, making coding faster, more accurate, and less disruptive to patient care. In the United States, ICD-10 remains the primary system in clinical use, but the global shift toward ICD-11 is reshaping how HIM professionals train and work.
Privacy Laws That Shape the Work
Two federal laws form the legal backbone of health information management in the U.S. HIPAA established baseline rules for protecting patient data. The HITECH Act of 2009 strengthened those rules significantly, particularly around electronic health information. It created four tiers of violations based on how culpable the organization was, with penalties reaching up to $1.5 million for all violations of a single provision. Even unintentional violations that an organization didn’t know about can now result in penalties under the lowest tier.
There is one notable protection: if a violation is corrected within 30 days and wasn’t caused by willful neglect, penalties may not apply. HIM professionals are often the ones responsible for building and maintaining the compliance systems that keep organizations on the right side of these laws, from controlling who can access records to ensuring that electronic transmissions are secure.
HIM vs. Health Informatics
These two fields overlap enough to cause confusion, but they have distinct focuses. Health information management is concerned with managing the data itself: making sure patient records are accurate, properly coded, and securely accessible. Health informatics is concerned with managing the systems that hold and move that data, working at the intersection of computer science and healthcare to design databases, build security infrastructure, and create the tools clinicians use daily.
In practical terms, HIM professionals spend more time on coding, billing, regulatory compliance, and direct record review. Informatics professionals lean toward system design, programming, data analysis, and infrastructure. Some informaticists are directly involved in patient care, analyzing data and images that clinicians use to plan treatment. HIM professionals are more likely to work with administrative and insurance workflows. Both fields require fluency in healthcare, but they approach it from different angles.
How AI Is Changing the Field
Artificial intelligence is already reshaping daily HIM work. AI tools now assist with medical coding, billing, and clinical note-taking, making these tasks significantly faster. Behind the scenes, AI also handles dynamic staff scheduling, bed management, and supply chain logistics in healthcare facilities. For HIM professionals, this means less time on repetitive manual tasks and more focus on quality oversight, compliance, and complex cases that require human judgment. The 2025 ICD-11 update’s integration of natural language processing reflects this broader shift toward automation in coding and documentation.
Education, Credentials, and Career Outlook
Two primary credentials define the HIM career ladder. The Registered Health Information Technician (RHIT) credential requires completing an associate degree in health information management from a program accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM). Candidates then pass a 150-question exam administered at Pearson VUE testing centers, with three and a half hours to complete it. The Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA) credential requires a bachelor’s degree and covers a broader, more advanced scope of practice.
The career outlook is strong. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the median annual wage for medical records specialists was $50,250 in May 2024, and employment is projected to grow 7 percent from 2024 to 2034, which is much faster than the average for all occupations. That growth is driven by an aging population generating more health data, expanding regulatory requirements, and the ongoing digitization of health records across every care setting.