Report on the 19th World Congress of the International Federation of Health Information Management Associations Julie Price The 19th International Federation of Health Information Management Associations (IFHIMA) Congress was held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates from Sunday 17 to Thursday 21 November 2019, with the major theme being ‘empowering health information management professionals through a global voice’. The congress was hosted by the Saudi Health Information Management Association with many representative attendees from countries in the region as well as representatives from Australia, United States of America (USA), Canada, England, Korea, and Indonesia to name a few. On Sunday there was a series of pre-conference workshops that focussed on the congress topics of health information management, healthcare transformation, research, healthcare finance, value based healthcare, educating for the future, health information management survival, health informatics, digitisation of health, healthcare quality and patient safety, clinical coding, classification and terminologies and workforce development. Over the next three days there were many conjoint sessions on these topics and on the final day there was an International Classification of Diseases Eleventh Edition workshop, including some clinical coding activities as well as a hospital visit for some of the attendees. Our final evening in Dubai involved a four-wheel drive adventure in the desert, followed by camel rides, entertainment and dinner under the stars. Through the sessions I attended, the message I took away from the congress is that data quality should be at the centre of everything we do as health information management professionals. An editorial in the Health Information Management Journal of Australia by Kilkenny and Robinson (2018) entitled Data Quality: ‘Garbage in – garbage out’ reminds us of this point and with a focus on data analytics across many industries including health, data quality will become a focus for anyone trying to answer questions from their data.
There were many interesting and engaging presentations held throughout the congress. However, I wanted to highlight a couple of sessions that I found very engaging. The first one was on capacity building in countries that are not capturing cause of death certification. In thinking about this session, I asked myself ‘How could Health Information Managers (HIMs) get involved?’ as I have previously lectured on the death certification process. It dawned on me that the information from this certificate is vital in public health planning on a global level. As custodians of the data and with a focus on quality, HIMs should get involved, at least within the hospital context, so that we are always looking for ways to continuously improve the quality of the data used for so many purposes. For example, by developing a poster to assist clinicians with the certification process. The second session I want to highlight is clinical documentation improvement (CDI), an area of increasing interest in the Australian context. There were a number of excellent speakers during this session presenting on different aspects of CDI.
Cause of death certification – The ultimate morbidity statistics Dr Azza Badr from the World Health Organization presented an engaging session in the coding and classification session entitled ‘Importance of Mortality and Cause of Death Statistics’. This session on capacity building in countries with poor mortality data collection systems discussed a series of simple steps from death to documenting cause of death and underlying conditions, coding the documented causes, checking and validating data quality and then reporting. She reminded all member countries in the audience about the importance of collecting accurate mortality statistics she described as the ultimate ‘morbidity statistics’. Having, complete and accurate global statistics on mortality and the underlying causes are the foundation of public health interventions and health promotion activities. As described by Brooke et al. (2017), the ultimate public health interventions prevent the factors that lead to death. 37 HIM-INTERCHANGE • Vol 10 No 1 2020 • ISSN 1838-8620 (PRINT) ISSN 1838-8639 (ONLINE)
