JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

The field of health information management (HIM) focuses on the protection and management of health information from a variety of sources. The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) Council for Excellence in Education (CEE) determines the needed skills and competencies for this field. AHIMA’s HIM Curricula Competencies are divided into several domains among the associate, baccalaureate, and graduate levels. Moreover, AHIMA’s Career Map displays career paths for HIM professionals. What is not known is whether these competencies and the Career Map align with what industry requests.

Objective:

To analyze HIM job postings on a US national job recruiting website to determine whether the job postings align with recognized HIM domains. Secondly, to evaluate the AHIMA Career Map to determine whether the Career Map aligns with the job postings.

Methods:

A national job recruitment website was mined electronically (web scraping) using the search term “health information management.” This cross-sectional inquiry evaluated job advertisements during a two-week period in 2021. After exclusion criteria, 691 job postings were analyzed. Data were evaluated with descriptive statistics and natural language processing (NLP). Soft cosine measures (SCM) were used to determine correlations between job postings and the AHIMA Career Map, AHIMA curricular competencies and curricular considerations. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was utilized to determine statistical significance.

Results:

Forty percent of job postings were in the Southwest, followed by the Midwest, West, and Northeast. The educational level requested was evenly distributed between high school diploma (31.6%), associate degree (38.6%), or baccalaureate (32.5%). A master’s degree was requested in only 8.4% of the postings, with 72.4% preferred and 27.6% required. An RHIT degree was the most commonly requested credential (29.9%) followed by RHIA (26%). SCM scores were significantly higher in the informatics category when compared to the coding and revenue cycle (p=0.006) and data analytics (p<0.001), but not significantly different from the information governance category (p=0.85). The coding and revenue cycle category had a significantly higher SCM score compared to the data analytics category (p<0.001). Additionally, the information governance category was significantly higher than the data analytics category (p<0.001). SCM scores were significantly different between each competency category except there were no differences in the average SCM score between the information protection and revenue cycle management categories (p=0.96) and the information protection and data structure, content, and information governance categories (p=0.31).

Conclusions:

Industry job postings sought a high school diploma and associate degrees primarily, with a master’s degree a distant third. NLP analysis of job postings suggested that the correlation between informatics and job postings was higher than coding, revenue cycle, and data analytics.