After spending a week driving around Southern Baja California, I’m back in Cabo, with Internet access, continuing with my study efforts for the Healthcare Technician certificate.  Note that I said “certificate” rather than “certification.”  CompTIA, I suspect for legal reasons, characterizes passing this test as providing a “certificate.”  Rationale is that given the medical business is highly regulated, there were fears associated with characterizing the successful passage of the HIT-001 as providing a “certification.”  Since being “honored” by CompTIA relative to a regulated industry, doesn’t amount to licensing, CompTIA is effectively providing recognition of its inability to “license.”

As far as studying goes, having read a number of reviews about the quality of the ElementK book, I’m avoiding its use and have as a focused study tool the recently released book by Mark Ciampa and Mark Revels titled “Introduction to Healthcare Information Technology.”  My “pre-test” review of the book gives it a big “Thumbs Up.”  If I’m eventually able to teach this course, I would certainly accept it as my textbook.  It is an easy to read and interesting book.  It is clearly written to the exam objectives and appears to adequately cover the computer networking and security areas, and hopefully does the same with regard to those objectives that are specific to the healthcare industries.

My plan is to either take the exam on Friday, June 1st, or shortly thereafter.  I’ll update the blog to include my thoughts relative to the exam and indicate whether or not my effort at obtaining the “certificate” was successful.

Steve

I’m fortunate in having a relationship with the California Institute of Arts and Technology, in that as an education partner with CompTIA their instructors have the ability periodically to take certification exams at no cost.  Taking advantage of this “freebie,” I obtained a voucher to take the new HIT-001 exam.  It expires at the end of June.  Good news is that sets a deadline for me to complete the certification.

Going to the usual sites, it doesn’t look like there is much out there relative to study materials.  As a college instructor I’m able to get access to ebooks at no cost to ramp up and learn materials I’ll be teaching.  Assuming the California budget situation gets better I may add a course relating to this certification and it makes sense in making that determination that I look at potential textbooks and other sources for teaching the class.  I downloaded the a textbook yesterday to my iPad via CourseSmart, and will be utilizing it for my study efforts.  So the study focus will be on:

• HIT-001 Exam Objectives
• Introduction to Healthcare Information Technology

To be perfectly honest I’m not sure just how valuable this certification will be, nor how difficult the exam is.  From what I’ve been reading it looks to me like those who have been in the IT business for a year or so and have the knowledge base to pass the A+ exams should be able to pass that portion of the exam devoted to IT questions.  The unknown is the portion of the exam that focuses on healthcare (e.g. HIPAA specific privacy issues).

Since I’ll be heading out next week to Cabo for about two weeks, I won’t be taking the exam before the end of the month.  Problem with Cabo is that I doubt I’ll be able to access the Internet much of the time.  But that inability to do so will provide valuable study time so the plan is to read the textbook and get my knowledge of healthcare up to speed so I suspect I’ll take the exam in early June shortly after my return.

Steve