Meet Dr. Donna Silsbee, AHIMA’s 2022 Distinguished Educator Award Recipient

Donna Silsbee, PhD, RHIA CCS, CTR, was introduced as the recipient of the 2022 Making Dreams Come True Distinguished Educator Award during the 2022 Assembly on Education Symposium (AOE22).

Silsbee recently retired from the State University of New York Polytechnic Institute (SUNY Polytechnic), where she taught health information management (HIM) for 42 years. When asked what the Distinguished Educator Award meant to her, she shared: “It’s very gratifying. I was nominated by my peers and my own school faculty, and it’s so great to receive recognition from your peers.”

A Passion for Educational Excellence

As a high school student, Silsbee was inspired by a math teacher to pursue teaching. She began her collegiate career with the intention of becoming a high school math teacher, but after her first student-teaching role in college, she found that working with high school students wasn’t for her. She changed course to pursue a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics, and subsequently enrolled in the US Public Health Service Hospital Medical Record Administration program located in Baltimore, Maryland.

Silsbee wouldn’t stay away from education for long. Early on in her career, she worked as assistant director and later director of medical records at an 815-bed teaching hospital in upstate New York. During her time there, she saw a need for more qualified staff and began teaching classes to staff members on various aspects of HIM to ensure standards of quality.

When SUNY Polytechnic founded a baccalaureate level HIM program in 1980, applying for a faculty position was an obvious choice for Silsbee. She was accepted as the program director and sole faculty member at the time and would go on to serve as program director for 33 years before stepping aside to allow someone else the opportunity. Silsbee continued as a faculty member for another nine years before her retirement in May of 2022.

Volunteer Work

An active member of AHIMA since 1973, Silsbee’s service to her peers is second to none. Since becoming a member, she has held every office and chaired every committee at the state and local level. She also served at the national level as delegate for New York state several times over the course of her career and has been a member of the AHIMA Assembly on Education (AOE) since its founding.

Committed to excellence within the HIM education field, Silsbee volunteered as an accreditation site visitor with the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics & Information Management Education (CAHIIM) and its predecessor CAHEA for 14 years. As a site visitor, she traveled to college-level health informatics and information management education programs from California to Puerto Rico, evaluating their compliance with accreditation standards.

Advancing the Future of HIM

Looking to the next generation of HI professionals and educators, Silsbee shared some tips for success.

“You have to be a lifelong learner, because the field is not stagnant, it’s always changing, and you have to change and adapt with it. I also think it’s important to get professional credentials, like the RHIA or the RHIT, because it gives you credibility and shows you have a certain body of knowledge about this field that you can bring. Once you’ve been practicing, you may also want to go for specialty credentials so you continue to grow.”

According to Silsbee, lifelong learning and a growth mindset are core tenants of successfully educating the next generation of HIM professionals.

“I’d like to think that education drives practice. That is, the forward-thinking people in our field see the direction that healthcare is going in the healthcare delivery system and find ways for HIM to fit into that. In the past, we’ve had vision statements from AHIMA, a 10-year vision for where the association and field practitioners would be in the next decade. As educators, we’ve been trying to move the field in that direction, because we have a prescribed curriculum that is designed to shape the field. So, I think the practitioners we’re producing are beginning to realize AHIMA’s vision, because it’s the educators who are training those new practitioners that are coming into the field.”

A Career Well-Rewarded

Despite her many accomplishments, Silsbee describes seeing former students and hearing how they’re moving the field forward as one of the most rewarding aspects of her multifaceted career.

“The thing I like the best is seeing our graduates. It’s always fun to catch up with them and see what they’re doing these days. Many have branched out beyond traditional HIM, and they’re now in roles like corporate compliance officers, privacy officers, or reimbursement specialists. A number of them have decided to go into cancer registry or trauma registry work. I think they’re expanding the field, and I like to see that. It’s nice to feel like we’ve had a small piece in preparing them for making a difference through their careers.”

Although recently retired, Silsbee has no plans for slowing down. She continues to teach part-time at SUNY Polytechnic while maintaining her credentials and keeping up with the latest in the field. “It’s just part of me to be a health information manager. I don’t know that I’ll ever totally give that up.”