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Key takeaway: Health information management (HIM) is the discipline that governs patient health data – how it is captured, coded, classified, secured, released, and used. HIM degrees train you in clinical classification systems such as ICD-10-CM/PCS and CPT, electronic health record (EHR) systems, HIPAA and health data privacy, health informatics, and revenue cycle operations. Unlike many fields, HIM has a programmatic accreditor that matters: the Commission on Accreditation for Health Informatics and Information Management Education (CAHIIM). Credential eligibility is tied to it, so accreditation is not a formality here. Compare accredited programs below.
HIM sits at the intersection of healthcare, law, and data. The record a clinician creates has to be complete enough to support care, coded accurately enough to support billing, structured enough to support analytics, and protected well enough to satisfy federal privacy rules – and HIM professionals are responsible for all four at once. Accredited online programs generally deliver the same curriculum and degree titles as campus programs; browse the best accredited online colleges to compare schools that offer them.
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Source:IPEDSCollege Scorecard
Source:IPEDSCollege Scorecard
Source:IPEDSCollege Scorecard
Source:Accreditor: Northwest Commission on Colleges and UniversitiesIPEDSCollege Scorecard
Source:Accreditor: Middle States Commission on Higher EducationIPEDSCollege Scorecard
Source:Accreditor: Middle States Commission on Higher EducationIPEDSCollege Scorecard
Source:IPEDSCollege Scorecard
Source:Accreditor: Northwest Commission on Colleges and UniversitiesIPEDSCollege Scorecard
HIM graduates work in hospitals and health systems, physician practices, insurance payers, cancer and trauma registries, health IT vendors, consulting firms, and public health agencies. The occupations below are commonly associated with health information management coursework. Median annual wages come from the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program.
Entry requirements differ sharply across these occupations. Medical and health services manager roles, which had a median annual wage of $123,860 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025 OEWS), commonly expect a bachelor’s degree plus healthcare work experience, and many HIM department director positions expect a credential such as the RHIA. Health information technologist and medical registrar roles, at a median annual wage of $68,020 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025 OEWS), sit closer to the informatics and registry side of the field and often expect an associate or bachelor’s degree with credentialing. Medical records specialist roles, at a median annual wage of $51,140 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2025 OEWS), are the most common entry point and typically expect a postsecondary certificate or associate degree, with coding credentials frequently requested. Individual outcomes vary by employer, geography, and experience.
A health information management degree trains you to govern patient health data across its life cycle: documentation standards, clinical coding and classification, EHR system management, privacy and security under HIPAA, data quality and governance, and the revenue cycle processes that depend on coded data. It is a data and compliance discipline applied to a clinical setting, not a clinical-care degree.
Associate, bachelor’s, and master’s, plus certificate programs in medical coding. The associate level is the traditional route into coding and records roles; the bachelor’s is the level most closely associated with the RHIA credential and management-track work; the master’s typically shifts toward health informatics, analytics, and department leadership.
Because credential eligibility depends on it. CAHIIM accredits health information management and health informatics programs, and eligibility for the Registered Health Information Administrator (RHIA) credential typically requires a bachelor’s degree from a CAHIIM-accredited program. If credentialing is part of your plan, verify a program’s CAHIIM accreditation status directly with CAHIIM before enrolling rather than relying on marketing language.
Health information management is about the data: records, coding systems, informatics, privacy, and data governance. Healthcare administration is about running the organization: operations, staffing, budgets, service lines, and regulatory compliance at the facility level. They overlap at the management layer – an HIM director is a healthcare manager – but the coursework is genuinely different, and HIM is the narrower, more technical of the two.
No. HIM programs assume no prior clinical training and build the needed background themselves, typically through medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, and pathophysiology courses taken early in the sequence. You need to be comfortable with clinical vocabulary and detailed rule-based systems, not with patient care.
HIM curricula generally move through three layers, and the first one is the reason people underestimate the degree.
The first layer is clinical foundation. Medical terminology, anatomy and physiology, and pathophysiology are prerequisites to everything that follows, because you cannot assign a diagnosis code to documentation you cannot read. Pharmacology often appears here as well. These courses are not optional background – coding accuracy depends directly on them.
The second layer is classification and systems. This is the technical core: ICD-10-CM for diagnoses and ICD-10-PCS for inpatient procedures, CPT and HCPCS for outpatient and physician services, and the reimbursement methodologies built on top of them, including diagnosis-related groups. Alongside coding sits EHR system management – master patient index integrity, document imaging, release of information workflows, interoperability standards, and the data dictionaries that determine whether two systems mean the same thing by the same field.
The third layer is governance, law, and analysis. HIPAA privacy and security rules, breach notification, retention schedules, and release-of-information law are covered in depth, because HIM is usually where the privacy function sits operationally. Data quality and governance coursework covers auditing, documentation improvement, and registry management. Health informatics and healthcare analytics coursework teaches you to turn coded clinical data into something a quality committee or payer contract negotiation can use. Most programs also include a supervised professional practice experience.
At the bachelor’s level, expect roughly 120 credits, with the HIM core concentrated in the junior and senior years. At the master’s level, expect roughly 30 to 42 credits with a heavier informatics, analytics, and leadership emphasis.
The work splits roughly into three shapes. Records and coding positions – medical records specialist, inpatient or outpatient coder, coding auditor, release of information specialist – work directly with documentation and classification systems, and are the most common entry point. Informatics and registry positions – health information technologist, EHR analyst, clinical data analyst, cancer or trauma registrar – work on systems and datasets rather than individual records, and lean more on database and analytics skills. Management positions – HIM director, privacy officer, revenue cycle manager, compliance manager – carry departmental responsibility and typically expect a bachelor’s plus experience and a credential.
Titles vary widely across employers, and a “health information specialist” at one hospital may do work that another calls coding, analytics, or compliance. Read the responsibilities rather than the title. For general labor-market context on these occupations, see the Bureau of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook.
HIM or a related field? Choose health information management for depth in health data, coding systems, privacy, and informatics. Consider healthcare administration if you want to run healthcare organizations rather than manage their data, healthcare for a broader view of the sector and its degree options, or data analytics if your interest is analysis technique across industries rather than the clinical domain specifically.
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