Content area
Full Text
Editor's note: this practice brief supplants the January 2005 practice brief "The HIMRoIe in Patient Safety and Quality of Care:
ACHIEVING HIGH QUALITY, cost-efficient healthcare requires collaboration among all healthcare professionals and stakeholders. Currently the quality of healthcare tends to be inconsistent, disorganized, and inefficient, with some patients receiving excellent care, while others receive substandard care.
Drug safety, medical mistakes, healthcare- acquired conditions, information system constraints, and fragmented delivery systems are just some of the many issues affecting healthcare quality and safety. Addressing these challenges requires organizations capture valid and reliable data that can be transformed into useable information to aid in developing change strategies.
Converting data into meaningful information for decision making calls for the expertise of credentialed HIM professionals. HIM professionals possess unique knowledge and expertise to enable strong partnerships with clinical and executive teams to advance the quality and safety of patient care delivery. In addition, effective HIM practices enable accurate data assignment, capture, analysis, trending of healthcare operations and patient safety, and output of objective data for decision making.
This practice brief outlines the critical functions HIM professionals perform in the delivery of safe, high-quality patient care.
HIM's Role in the Use of Healthcare Data
Since 1999 the Institute of Medicine has published several reports outlining the quality and safety issues that negatively affect the healthcare system. To eliminate these problems healthcare organizations must demonstrate greater diligence in capturing information that supports a more accurate measurement of healthcare quality, such as determining how adverse events (i.e., injuries caused by medical management, not the underlying disease) actually occur in hospitals.1
Existing data from administrative, laboratory, clinical registry, and electronic health record (EHR) systems can provide the necessary information to improve patient safety and quality. Effective HIM practices facilitate the aggregation of data from multiple sources to enable the capture of data once so it can be repurposed many times.2
A 2009 Pricewaterhouse Coopers report notes that data must be transparent and overseen by honest brokers or stewards to gain everyone's trust.3 HIM practices facilitate data stewardship by promoting the adoption of guidelines for data access, use, and control, as well as principles and guidelines for the standardization of content and definitions. The report goes on to say that the industry needs to...