The 31st-annual Health Information Professionals (HIP) Week runs October 11-17. The American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) celebrates health information professionals during the week with activities in their organizations and the community to raise awareness of the important work they perform.
“As our health care ecosystem continues to evolve, health information professionals remain committed to the principles of delivering the best inpatient care through the use of high-quality data that transforms health and health care,” said AHIMA CEO Wylecia Wiggs Harris, PhD, CAE.
To commemorate the week, the Health Informatics and Information Management program at UTHSC, is sharing videos on social media in tribute to two former UTHSC program alumni and members of the Tennessee Health Information Management Association, Tony Taylor, and Marcus Rickman, who passed away this year. The videos were recorded by former faculty member and Professor Emeritus Beth Bowman and program alumnus Seth Johnson.
“Health information professionals make an impact in health care, and that is evident now more than ever,” said Rebecca Reynolds, EdD RHIA, FAHIMA, program director of the Health Informatics and Information Management program. “Patients are more engaged with their data and health and HIM professionals are there to help integrate patient-initiated data into the electronic health record, which ensures the integrity and security of health care data for big data analysis.”
The pandemic has not deterred health information professionals at UTHSC from making notable achievements. Charisse Madlock-Brown, PhD, MLS, assistant professor of Health Informatics and Information Management in the College of Health Professions and co-director of Informatics at the Tennessee Clinical and Translational Science Institute, recently received an R25 grant from the National Institutes of Health for her work to identify and understand trends in age-related multimorbidity. She is the principal investigator on the study with co-investigators, Dr. Reynolds and James Bailey, MD, titled “Data-Driven Identification of Costly Multi-Morbidity Groupings and Their Progression.”
Dr. Madlock-Brown also recently gave the keynote address at Oregon State University’s End-of-Summer Symposium via Zoom. The title of her presentation was “Social determinants of health related to COVID-19: disparities between urban and rural communities,” which focused on her work on the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (n3C) as the co-lead for the social determinants of health and COVID-19 task team. Researchers on this team identify publicly available datasets, perform data quality assessment on data elements of interest, and create getting started materials.
Since 1954, the UTHSC College of Health Professions’ Health Informatics and Information Management program has been preparing graduates with the skills and competencies needed to manage the increasingly complex environment of electronic health care. Offering two tracks; entry-level and post-graduate — the UTHSC HIIM program is 100-percent online. For more information, please visit the program website.