A career in Health Information Management or Information Technology is right for you if you:

• See yourself in a career that offers diverse opportunities.
• Would like to work in health care, but not directly with patients.
• Have an aptitude for science, but also like management, law, and computers.
• Enjoy working with professionals: physicians, nurses, lawyers, administrators and executives.
• Want a career where you can choose to work on your own, with others, or some of both.

Health Information Management (HIM) and Health Information Technology (HIT) programs incorporate the disciplines of medicine, management, finance, information technology, and law into one curriculum. Because of this unique mixture, HIM graduates can choose from a variety of work settings across an array of healthcare environments.

Brian Dessoy is an RHIA with an MBA.  He is the IT director of Enterprise Business Solutions and Revenue Cycle with Spectrum Health Hospitals, located in Grand Rapids, MI.

Brian Dessoy didn’t know circuits and programs when he became the IT Director at a major hospital system. Management asked him to apply for the job after they recognized his keen sense of the hospital business and knowledge of HIM. 

Brian ensures the revenue cycle flows in a timely manner, and it is up to him to envision ways to make the billing process and other financial elements work better by suggesting business changes and installing IT applications. “Having this background in coding and HIM has been really helpful because I have a perspective that nobody else has,” Dessoy said. “I actually have the clinical perspective, and then I understand the business side as well.”

He started his career as a coder, then as a coding manager following college graduation with a bachelor’s degree in HIM. Dessoy caught the eye of Spectrum’s Technology Information Systems vice president and was asked to apply for the IT director position. “I was like, ‘Look, I am not technical at all,’” Dessoy said. “And he said, ‘You know what, I don’t want somebody who is technical. I want somebody who can understand the process.’” 

Rhonda Childress, RHIT, is manager of clinical revenue for Baptist Health Systems, based in Birmingham, AL.  She works daily to ensure the bills issued for healthcare services at Baptist’s hospitals include clean, accurate codes and follows standards.“This is the middle of the revenue cycle,” she says. “This is where the rubber meets the road as far as getting those charges on the accounts, making sure they made it to the bill.

You have to make sure you fine tune all of this information to make a bill fly out the door clean and correct.” Childress is put to work every time there is a change in the coding rules. Her department must educate the coders at Baptist’s four hospitals what those changes are, and then ensure the coding changes are enacted. Childress is also responsible for the smooth operation and maintenance of Baptist’s “charge master”, the system that helps correctly charge and issue each patient’s bill.  “If the charge master is not correct, and we are not charging for everything that we can charge for, then we are going to automatically miss money from our bottom line,” Childress says.

Childress worked in several traditional HIM positions before landing the manager of clinical revenue position at Baptist in 2005.  While many hospitals employ those with nursing backgrounds for the manager of clinical revenue position, Childress says HIM professionals with clinical knowledge are a good fit for the role. It is her extensive coding knowledge that makes Childress such an asset to her department. HIM knows both the clinical and the administrative sides of healthcare, both necessary for a manager of clinical revenue, Childress says.

Being the manager of clinical revenue is not your typical HIM position. “The field is so broad now,” she says. “It is just unreal what all you can do.”

Karolyn Broussard, MBA, RHIA, is regional president of QHR, a healthcare advisory and outsourcing company based in Brentwood, Tennessee and she knows that beneath every successful hospital lays a successful HIM department.

A former HIM director turned healthcare consultant, Broussard’s job as regional president of QHR is to ensure 55 hospitals operate with accuracy and a healthy bottom-line.

“I still firmly believe that HIM is at the hub of so many of the hospital’s operations and success,” Broussard, MBA, RHIA, says. “And I am concerned now about the overall success and profitability of a hospital. And if they are not coding properly or managing the processes in a timely manner, that has a lot of do with their profitability.”

Her work in consulting led Broussard to the regional president title. She never figured she would leave the traditional HIM positions and become a consultant. But she is glad she did.  “(In consulting) you learn something new every single day,” she says. “And you are able to take the new knowledge to the next setting and help others based upon the accumulated experience.”

Broussard uses her HIM background daily in her current position. “What I do today, you have to understand physicians, and I think there is no better place to start learning how physicians operate than in the HIM setting,” she says.

Those wanting to become consultants need to first experience the live healthcare setting, Broussard says. Start in the traditional HIM roles, and take every opportunity to learn. “A consultant has to bring a portfolio of experience, a proven track record,” she says. “You can’t go out and consult in a given setting unless you have walked through those processes many times.”

When Cecilia Backman talks, people listen. That’s what they pay her for, and with good reason. The HIM professional turned HIM product analyst knows medical records and their inherit issues. Backman is a RHIA with a complimentary credential of CPHQ, she also holds a MBA.

Backman assists in the design of automated clinical documentation products for Pennsylvania based medical solutions company Siemens Health Services. The company’s products are used by physicians and emergency room doctors to help simplify the documentation process.

Though working in a non-traditional HIM setting, Backman says her background in HIM is used daily. After all, she worked in various HIM positions from coder to quality assurance coordinator before moving into the consulting role at Siemens.

“We (HIM professionals) understand the structure and the content of the record,” Backman says. “We can look beyond what is just needed for patient care.”

She advises anyone interested in transitioning from traditional HIM roles to the vendor analyst side keep an open mind and be willing to soak up as much information as possible about healthcare operations, Backman says a business degree doesn’t hurt either.

“Be willing to learn not only what goes on in your area, but what goes on in other areas of the organization,” she says. “Really understand and embrace the supportive role that (HIM) department plays within an organization.”