Health Information Management (HIM) Research Guide

LCC Library licenses many research databases that focus specifically on information for Health Professions. Click here to see a list of Health Professions databases and read a description about their holdings, relevant dates, or special features.

HIM students are working at the intersections of healthcare and business systems, and general databases will also have lots of relevant information.

Start with one of these large research databases:

Academic Search Complete

CINAHL Plus Full-text

Health Source: Nursing Academic Edition

General OneFile

Business Source Complete

US Major Dailies (searches 5 major US newspapers, including the NY Times at once)

Depending on your research question or problem, information from these websites may be helpful:

• CDC (Centers for Disease Control)
• NIH (National Institutes of Health) for info/statistics
• AHIMA (American Health Information Management Association) Body of Knowledge — browse by topic
• Centers for Medicare & Medicaid (CMS) Outreach & Education Resources
• National Center for Health Statistics — browse by topic

The Library has hundreds of books and ebooks relevant to students in the HIM program but they are not all shelved together.
Find resources using the Library Catalog using keywords or subject terms related to your research question. Our collection includes books, ebooks, streaming videos, and more.

Some important subject terms are:

medical records

medical informatics

clinical coding

health information

health services administration

electronic health records

nosology -- code numbers

information storage and retrieval systems -- medical care

You can search commonly used keywords or phrases such as "medical billing" or "medical coding" which are used in titles. Keywords like Medicare, Medicaid, or specific software or applications may also be relevant to your research.

Google Scholar can be a powerful source of scholarly information. It's easy to use, looking and feeling just like Google. But the results you will get will be very different.

Here's some of what you may find:

1. Peer-reviewed journal articles
2. Other previously published journal articles 
3. Unpublished scholarly articles 
4. Master's theses and other degree or classwork 
5. Citations for books, some of which link to parts of the actual book online. 

The LCC Library participates in the Google Scholar Library Links program.  If you set your Google Scholar Settings to include links to articles found in LCC Library databases, you will be able to access full-text (that is, the entire article instead of just the citation and abstract), peer-reviewed articles from LCC Library databases as well as other sources.