I have to begin this first editorial of Educational Perspectives in Health Informatics and Information Management (EPHIIM) by going back into the rich history of health information management (HIM) education to provide some insight into our evolution to this point. I must start by stating that this is not the first research journal dedicated to HIM education.
As healthcare reform and technology further define the role and work expectations of the health information management professional, the need for clinical documentation specialists (CDSs) is likely to expand. This article examines the current and potential growth of the CDS profession within a variety of healthcare providers. 
Currently, minimal requirements exist for assessing the usability of electronic health record (EHR) systems. Usability requirements are especially lacking for the increasing use of mobile devices to access EHRs. Therefore, the authors investigated the usability of three commercially available certified ambulatory EHR systems as accessed on mobile devices. The study used the System Usability Scale (SUS) among a sample of college-level health professions students.  
This study examines the critical thinking skills of health informatics and allied health students. The Health Sciences Reasoning Test was utilized to investigate the critical thinking skills of 57 graduating seniors in the class of 2011 at a university in the southeastern United States. Results indicate that 64.9 percent of the participants had weak critical thinking skills, 31.6 percent of the participants had moderate critical thinking skills, and 3.5 percent of the participants had strong critical thinking skills. 
The Summer 2013 issue of Perspectives in Health Information Management features an article on the benefits and constraints of telemedicine; a study of contraceptive use among women Veterans; and a case study on implementing a web-enabled reporting application for a pathology department.
Look for the Fall 2013 issue of Perspectives in October.
Contraceptive use among women Veterans may not be adequately captured using administrative and pharmacy codes. Clinical progress notes may provide a useful alternative. The objectives of this study were to validate the use of administrative and pharmacy codes to identify contraceptive use in Veterans Health Administration data, and to determine the feasibility and validity of identifying contraceptive use in clinical progress notes.
This article describes the benefits and constraints of telemedicine, focusing primarily on the field of psychiatry in the United States with the current system of healthcare. Telepsychiatry is believed to provide better access and higher-quality care to patients who need psychiatric care and cost savings to providers of such care. Telemedicine has been successfully integrated into psychiatric facilities reaching rural areas, prisons, and urban facilities.
This article presents a case study in designing, developing, and implementing a web-enabled reporting application for the anatomical pathology (histopathology) department of a tertiary care teaching hospital in India. The article describes workflows, requirements assessment, and implementation methods that the investigators adopted for deploying the solution.
The transition to ICD-10-CM/PCS has expanded educational opportunities for educators and trainers who are taking on the responsibility of training coders on the new system. Coding education currently faces multiple challenges in the areas of how to train the new workforce, what might be the most efficient method of providing that training, how much retraining of the current workforce with ICD-9-CM training will be required, and how to meet the national implementation deadline of 2014 in the most efficacious manner. This research sought to identify if there was a difference between a group of participants with no knowledge of ICD-9-CM and those with some knowledge of ICD-9-CM in scores on an ICD-10-CM/PCS quiz.
The benefits of converting to ICD-10-CM/PCS have been well documented in recent years. One of the greatest challenges in the conversion, however, is how to train the workforce in the code sets. The International Classification of Diseases, Tenth Revision, Procedure Coding System (ICD-10-PCS) has been described as a language requiring higher-level reasoning skills because of the system’s increased granularity. Training and problem-solving strategies required for correct procedural coding are unclear.
The astonishing improvement of high-throughput biotechnologies in recent years makes it possible to access a huge amount of genomic data. The association between genomic data and genetic disease has already been and will continue to be applied to personalized healthcare. Health information management (HIM) professionals are the ones who will handle personal genetic information and provide solid evidence to support physicians’ diagnoses and personalized treatment strategies, and therefore they will need to have the knowledge and skills to process genomic data.
Hospital management and researchers are increasingly using electronic databases to study utilization, effectiveness, and outcomes of healthcare provision. Although several studies have examined the accuracy of electronic databases developed for general administrative purposes, few studies have examined electronic databases created to document the care provided by individual hospitals. In this study, we assessed the accuracy of an electronic database in a major teaching hospital in Eastern Province, Saudi Arabia, in documenting the 17 comorbidities constituting the Charlson index as recorded in paper charts by care providers.
