Health information technicians work for hospitals, doctor’s offices and healthcare institutions, where they’re tasked with the technical aspect of organizing the institution’s health records. The job involves several main tasks, such as filing documents in their appropriate sections, maintaining the systems that are used to access the information, and providing the stored information to other employees on request. Health information technicians are also sometimes tasked with performing technical maintenance on the computers that are used to store the information, and most companies usually have dedicated technicians specifically for this job.
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Even though the job doesn’t require a higher educational degree by default, having one can still be of great benefit to candidates looking to get hired – this is especially valid for those with a degree in a subject like computer science or engineering, or even something medicine-related (though of course people with the latter type of degree usually take the job only as a temporary source of income).
Working as a health information technician can either be very lucrative or not rewarding enough, depending on the specifics of the job. It’s a similar situation like with health information managers, with the only difference that technicians tend to receive smaller overall compensations for any extra work they’re required to perform. The average annual salary is between $37,000 – $52,000, and the job can have some very long working hours as well.