Proposal for improving the education and licensing examination for medical record administrators in Korea

The Korean licensing examination for medical record administrators (MRAs) was introduced in 1985, and as of 2017, approximately 25,000 MRAs have been produced [1]. Over the past 30 years, MRAs have contributed to establishing a foundation for medical record management and building a safe medical environment. Health information management professionals, including MRAs are responsible for improving the quality of healthcare, which they accomplish by planning, collecting, aggregating, analyzing, and disseminating individual patient and aggregate clinical data [2]. Adopting healthcare technology offers the possibility to improve the delivery of care in ways that can provide exceptional quality, promptness, performance, and availability [3]. The greater availability of accurate, complete, and relevant clinical data allows care providers to deliver higher quality, more efficient, and cost-effective care [4]. There is a need to confirm the job competencies of MRAs who are working in an information-oriented environment. A study was conducted in 2016 to identify the political tasks necessary to improve the education and licensing examination to ensure that MRAs are highly qualified. The present study was performed using the second set of data from a survey and set of focus group interviews carried out in 2016 for a study funded by the Health Personnel Licensing Examination Board fund, entitled “A study on educating and producing excellent MRAs. The present study was exempt from Institutional Review Board approval at the researcher’s institution (IRB approval no., EUIRB 2018-29). Two rounds of interviews targeting 17 professional MRAs, consisting of professors and heads of health information management departments, were conducted. Through discussion and consensus with researchers, improvement tasks were classified into 4 major areas with 9 subsections, as shown in Table 1. Next, to prioritize the improvement tasks, a survey targeting MRAs was conducted using a questionnaire. The questionnaires were distributed to the 340 MRAs who participated in the 2016 fall conference of the Korean Medical Record Association. Tables presenting the results of this survey can be found in the supplement file (Supplement 1). The first task that was identified was to change the name of the occupation to strengthen its identity. Most of the MRAs surveyed wanted the name to be changed to ‘medical information manager,’ which would reflect changes in the working environment. Changing the job title is necessary to clearly convey the current role of MRAs in securing complete, accurate, and trustworthy medical information during the life cycle of information. The role of MRAs in foreign countries long ago changed from the management of medical records to the management of health information [5]. The request of MRAs for a change in their job title was accepted by the Korean government, and the related law was reformed at the end of 2017 [6]. The chosen title of ‘health information management specialist’ will be used beginning in December 2018. The second improvement task was the development of a diversified career path. With advances in information technology (IT), the scope of medical record information management has expanded to include healthcare support and research assistance, health information exchange, medical quality assurance, and providing the basic infrastructure of the medical industry. To develop the groundwork for developing a diversified career path, respondents were surveyed about their desired career path, with the following results in order from most to least preferred: public policy and research, medical information management, and information processing and data analysis. As shown in career guidance programs in the United States [7] and Canada [8], as the importance and value of medical record information is recognized, and the utilization thereof is increasing, the emeISSN: 1975-5937 Open Access