A Watershed Moment: Recommendations and Insights for the Health Information Profession to Meet the Emerging Needs of the Modern Healthcare Consumer

The modern consumer’s experience with information about their health and healthcare is simultaneously plentiful and overwhelming. Consumers now have multiple sources of information on their personal health and healthcare services literally within reach, from fitness trackers and other health monitoring devices to mobile applications that allow them to access their electronic health records (EHRs) and schedule appointments. However, the user experience of accessing, understanding, and easily using not only their own health information but also their family’s data is often confusing and frustrating—at a moment when consumers are increasingly accustomed to a more seamless experience from other industries.

For health information (HI) professionals who work in diverse workplace settings where health information is managed, helping the healthcare system better meet the needs of healthcare consumers—whether directly or indirectly—may require an evolution of their current skills and roles.

Leaders from health systems, insurers, health technology companies, health information exchanges, academic institutions, patient advocacy groups, and trade associations interviewed for this paper anticipate a range of upcoming shifts to the HI field.

These changes include the growing use of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) for many functions currently administered by HI professionals; the emergence of new healthcare companies focused on delivering an excellent consumer experience; and shifts in the healthcare regulatory environment.

Together, these trends may lead to a shift in the HI field to upskill and take on a more analytical, proactive, and mission-critical role in shaping the governance, management, accessibility, and use of health information for consumers, clinicians, and provider organizations alike.

In these roles—which will be contingent on support from the leaders of healthcare organizations—HI professionals may also be well-positioned to help their organizations uncover more insights regarding the connections between the conditions in the places where people live, work, and play, and their health, a concept also known as the social determinants of health (SDOH).

“So much of the information about [SDOH] is about the distinction between poverty and the human condition, and what the healthcare system currently focuses on,” says Tim Pletcher, Executive Director of the Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services (MiHIN).

Recommendations for AHIMA and HI Professionals

The themes of the interviewees’ perspectives on the impact of addressing current gaps in the needs of healthcare consumers on the HI field uncovered five core recommendations for AHIMA, its members, and other HI professionals and stakeholders. The recommendations are intended to help the HI field play a supportive role in efforts by the healthcare field and their organizations to address consumer expectations—though not necessarily in direct, patient-facing roles.

1. Prepare the HI field for more analytical capabilities and roles.

Healthcare providers, payers, healthcare technology companies, and other healthcare stakeholders anticipate a need for more analytical roles and skill sets within the HI field—as some functions that HI professionals currently handle are increasingly automated. This may include:

• Helping clinicians engage patients in the development and use of the information in their EHRs
• Advancing organizational value-based care initiatives and care coordination efforts through the design and management of online tools to support the use of related protocols; and related claims support activity to support changes in payment models
• Supporting organizational efforts to build new “digital front doors,” or online sites and portals where patients can schedule services

2. Prepare the profession for increased involvement in the governance and management of healthcare data.

The growth in health information from both traditional and emerging data sources outside the clinical workstream requires HI professionals to effectively manage, govern, and coordinate access to data from clinical, personal, and community-based sources. This work can support efforts to improve data quality and usability with clinicians and consumers alike, and may include:

• Closer coordination with clinicians to improve the design and delivery of data capture
• Increased advocacy internally and externally to support improved processes and regulatory changes to ease the exchange of information between entities
• Helping clinicians collect SDOH data in the health record with cultural sensitivity—including SDOH-related Z Codes
• Supporting efforts to understand, map, and manage the entire patient journey for specific disease states and their progression
• Coordinating the design, curation, and governance of existing and new data sources
• Managing artificial intelligence processes, particularly with complex patient cases

3. Develop strategies and resources that allow HI professionals and clinicians to improve the user experience of consumers—and address the social determinants of health.

Healthcare leaders envision HI professionals playing a larger role supporting clinical team members in their interactions with patients, including:

• Helping improve healthcare consumers’ user experience as it pertains to the collection of data and consumers’ access to data—which may support efforts to address health equity and improve consumer engagement in the development and use of their health records
• As these efforts mature, the potential development of educational resources by AHIMA and the HI community focused on improving the user experience of consumers

4. Increase HI participation in external advocacy and policy efforts.

By becoming more involved in advocacy and policy efforts outside their organizations, HI professionals can not only improve consumer access to their data but also seek to improve the quality and integrity of their health information (Click here to access AHIMA’s advocacy agenda).

These efforts may include:

• Collaborating with EHR vendors, industry task forces, and other stakeholders to design processes that keep up with shifts in both the organizational use of health data and consumer expectations for accessible information
• Informing patient matching efforts, or the identification and linking of one patient›s data within and across health systems to reduce medical errors and instances of duplicative testing
• Helping inform the Office of the National Coordinator’s (ONC) United States Core Data for Interoperability (USCDI) standard to improve nationwide interoperable data exchange—allowing consumers to share and exchange data with their providers both electronically and seamlessly
• Appropriately capturing data for evolving Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) quality measures to support efforts to improve the quality of care patients receive
• Providing oversight and support for organizational efforts to comply with federal transparency regulations requiring providers and payers to share information on the price of care with consumers and empower them with the information they need to make informed decisions about their health and healthcare

5. Prepare the HI field for the possibility of more direct interactions with patients in the future.

Interviewees expressed divergent opinions on the question of whether HI professionals will work more directly with patients to collect and provide access to health and healthcare information or pursue these ends indirectly.

More quantitative and qualitative research may be required to determine the probability and extent to which the HI profession will be engaged in increased patient interactions—and help determine the need for future education and workforce development in this arena.

This report was prepared by Kaufman Hall at the request of the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA). Download the full white paper here.