Abstract
The 20th Congress of the International Federation of Health Information Management Associations (IFHIMA), in collaboration with the 40th National Conference of the Health Information Management Association of Australia (HIMAA), was held in Brisbane, Queensland on 30 October–1 November 2023. To commemorate Australia’s hosting of this amazing event, this Special Issue of the Health Information Management Journal (HIMJ) presents a collection of articles from each of the IFHIMA (World Health Organization [WHO], 2023) regions. The authors of the highest-scoring abstract from each were invited to submit an article to HIMJ for peer review and potential inclusion in the Special Issue. These articles had to meet HIMJ submission criteria (e.g., ethics approval, not previously published elsewhere), and final copy submitted within the prescribed timeframe. A very enthusiastic gathering of international colleagues celebrated the opportunity to share their knowledge and experiences in acknowledgement of the Congress theme: Advancing global health: In pursuit of high-quality digital information.
IFHIMA is a not-for-profit, non-government organisation in official relations with the WHO and works closely with the WHO on projects and areas of WHO interest that relate to health records and information systems (IFHIMA, 2023). The IFHIMA regions align with those of the WHO: Africa, the Americas, Europe, the Eastern Mediterranean, Southeast Asia and the Western Pacific.
The six articles presented in this Special Issue of HIMJ (see Box 1) highlight the diversity of the health information management (HIM) profession, and the competencies that underpin our diverse areas of practice, demonstrating expert knowledge and skills about patient information systems, clinical classification, ethics, medico-legal practices and research, to mention a few. The competencies of “research methods,” “language of health care” and “classification systems” have been very ably demonstrated by Riley et al. (2023) (representing the Western Pacific region), in their study of the secondary use of ICD and ICD-10-AM coded data in the medical and wider health research environments, for describing population-level burden of disease and associated planning for health services.
Winning authors by IFHIMA region.
The need for all HIM competencies – and the problems created where they are lacking – is expertly described by Chima et al. (2023) (representing the African region). This research revealed key challenges associated with the absence, or inadequacy, of a HIM professional workforce well-trained in the HIM competencies. A workforce with these skills is essential to guide and manage the systems and integrity of data underpinning the decision-making and planning of a health service, optimising service provision to the population it serves. Those who teach these skills also support health service delivery by providers from other health disciplines, as demonstrated by Gibbs et al. (2023) (representing the Americas region). In a demonstration of their “research methods” competency, HIM educators at a United States of America university collaborated with allied health faculty educator colleagues in the doctoral physical therapy (DPT) programme to help identify health informatics (HI) content contained in the DPT curriculum. This enabled DPT graduates to utilise HI more fully in the increasingly digital healthcare setting.
Two of the other winning articles remind us of the impact wrought by COVID-19 on the world at large, and the healthcare sector specifically. The necessity to create solutions for service delivery as a substitute for in-person consultations saw a wide-ranging and rapid introduction of telehealth, often with systems being created “on the run.” Muzdalifah and Markham (2023) (representing the South-East-Asian region) demonstrated the “e-health” and “health services organisation and delivery” competencies in action, as they described the process undertaken by one Indonesian hospital to measure the preparedness of their facility to deliver telepsychiatry services to patients. This involved assessing the need for the service, the financial and operation considerations and the potential impact on staff and patients and finding the need for improvement with appointment scheduling, coordinating information across providers and patient documentation. In Iran, Salmani et al. (2023) (representing the Eastern Mediterranean region) brought into play the competencies of “research methods,” “HI and records management” and the “language of health care” by creating a comprehensive minimum dataset for COVID-19 patients specific to the needs of the Iranian community, based on the data collection tools developed by the WHO and Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
An outstanding demonstration of multiple HIM competencies was reported by Burns (2023) (representing the Europe region) in her description of an enormous project whereby over 1000 individual information systems in use across the Manchester Foundation National Health Service Trust (MFT) were integrated into one trust-wide electronic patient record. The 2-year readiness programme, including technical readiness, software development and migration planning for this major undertaking, has been reported, along with the impact on the MFT’s HIM teams. The enormity of this transition is a testament to how the volume and speed by which information is generated and required have grown exponentially. HIM competencies, as demonstrated in the MFT project, are central to the successful roll-out of full electronic medical record systems across Local Health Networks, Trusts and Districts. HIMs are first in line in understanding where data are sourced in in-patient administrative systems and keen-eyed in ensuring there is no loss in translation, for the integrity and robustness of same, when moving from one record management system to another; whether that be paper-based, paper-based to electronic or growth of electronic medical records. Digital health, among other competencies, is core to such large change management projects and HIMs relish these challenges.
As Presidents of HIMAA and IFHIMA, respectively, and Editor of HIMJ, we are very pleased to introduce you to the winning article from each of the IFHIMA regions and congratulate all winners for their amazing demonstrations of HIM competencies through their projects and processes, and their ongoing support of IFHIMA, and the HIM profession.
