Certified Healthcare Documentation Specialist

Healthcare documentation specialists are workers who focus on the administrative side of healthcare, working with documents and paperwork. Depending on their specific job, they could transcribe and edit recorded notes from physicians and other medical professionals, work with billing and medical coding, review and organize patient records, or update patient records.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, medical records specialists can make around $47,180 per year or $22.69 per hour.*

To become a healthcare documentation specialist, you need at least some post-high school education, though you don’t necessarily need a college degree to qualify for the job. You should get some training in healthcare basics like HIPAA practices, medical terminology, and electronic health records. Once you’ve completed training, the next step is to get certified. While certification isn’t required to find a job in the field, many employers may prefer to hire documentation specialists who are certified over those who aren’t. A common certification you can pursue is the Certified Electronic Health Records Specialist (CEHRS) exam.

CareerStep training programs are all focused on growing industries—particularly healthcare, which is projected to have 1.8 million job openings every year, on average, for the next decade.**

Medical record specialist jobs in particular are expected to grow 8% through 2032.*

Health information technicians have a pretty incredible gig. In simple terms, they use technology to help healthcare providers improve care and lower costs, but the day-to-day routines are a lot more involved than you might think. Typical job responsibilities include tracking patient outcomes for quality assessment, using classification software to assign clinical codes for insurance reimbursement, and recording data for collection, storage, analysis, retrieval, and reporting.