Monthly Archives: June 2012

In Search of a Healthcare IT Certification Path

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One of my goals in teaching is to help develop classes that meet the objective of providing students with career paths that will enable them to obtain employment or improve their skills relative to existing occupation.  With regard to this effort, I have no desire to reinvent the wheel.  I’m limiting my efforts relative to investigating the possibility of developing a healthcare IT certification path to a higher level and specifically avoiding typical career changers.  This is because in my region a program already exists for career changes.  It was developed with the help of a 5.5 million dollar grant by one of the colleges in the Los Rios District that is located about thirty (30) miles South of Sierra College.  You can view the program by clicking on the link to the College’s website.

I had lunch yesterday with a couple of key people at Sutter Health’s data security department.  This provided an opportunity to gain some insight from them relative to if there is a need for the development of a program.  While not surprising based upon my limited Internet research, there was a general unawareness relative to IT certifications for the healthcare industry.  Like me, these individuals have their CISSP certification, so they are not unfamiliar with what certifications are.  This tells me that something needs to be done by organizations like CompTIA and HealthITCertification to get the word out that their certifications are meaningful and provide an appropriate measure of competency relative to issues and concerns that are specific to the healthcare industry (in particular the privacy associated with protected health information).

I remain committed to following a due diligence approach to determining whether it makes sense to devote efforts towards the development of a healthcare IT program (academy).  Having achieved the CompTIA’s healthcare IT technician certificate, at this point I’m looking towards taking  the HealthITCertification CPHIT certification.  Good news is as the result of my investigation I’ve discovered a “free” source of study materials available from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) in conjunction with its award of “$10 million in grants to five domestic institutions of higher education to develop curriculum and instructional materials to enhance workforce training programs primarily at the community college level.”

You can access these materials by pointing your browser to their “Training and Dissemination Center” website. For a lifelong learner like me, this is a real find.  My areas of initial focus, based upon the curriculum index of modules that relate to “Privacy and Confidentiality,”  will be as follows:

Component 1/Unit 6
Component 2/Unit 8
Component 3/Unit 16
Component 4/Unit 2
Component 5/Unit 10
Component 7/Unit 7
Component 9/Unit 9
Component 13/Unit 2
Component 16/Unit 5

I’ll keep you informed as to how I’m progressing.

Steve

 

 

 

Passed the HIT-001 Exam

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A successful conclusion to the past couple of week’s studying while on vacation in Southern Baja California.  At night since there really wasn’t much to do, I relaxed by studying for CompTIA’s Healthcare IT Technician exam.  Notice I didn’t identify it as either a “certificate” or “certification” exam.  I’ll leave it up to CompTIA to clarify the difference.

Thoughts on the exam are that it provides a good mixture of IT technical questions with questions that relate specifically to healthcare issues, particularly as those questions are framed relative to application of HIPAA, HITECH, and other laws and regulations.  My score wasn’t particularly dazzling, obtaining a 767 out of 900 (passing score is 650).  There were 75 questions on the exam, and you are provided with 60 minutes to answer each questions.  That works out to 48 seconds a question, which can be troubling for test takers who find themselves focused on a single question only to wake up and discover they have 10 minutes to complete the remaining 40 questions.  If you fall into that category, I’ve created a video and other web content that may be helpful.  Titled “Intelligent Guessing,” you can reach it by clicking HERE.

Just to prove my accomplishment, here is my Exam Score Report:

My recommendation for those seeking this “certificate” is you focus your study efforts on the “Introduction to Healthcare Information Technology” book authored by Mark Ciampa and Mark Revels.  While it did not cover everything that was on the exam, if you have an understanding of its content I suspect you will walk away happy from the exam booth.

Steve

 

 

 

Certified Professional in Health Information Technology (CPHIT)

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Having achieved CompTIA Healthcare IT Technician status, I’m looking at the possibilities of identifying another healthcare information certificate or certification.  Research led me to an article authored by Ed Tittel, a familiar name in the ranks of certification authors, titled “Top 5 IT Certifications in Healthcare.”  Along with CompTIA’s Healthcare IT Technician, he identifies the Certified Professional in Health Information Technology (CPHIT) as a certification worth considering.  Like CompTIA’s offering, this certification does not require that you take a course in order to become certified.  For those “cost conscious” people like me seeking certifications, not having that requirement is a good thing since it enables me to “self-study” and still obtain certifications.

The certification was created by Health IT Certification, LLC.  According to information provided on its website, the “certification process has been developed by a team of both knowledgeable experts, as well those with a background in psychometrics, to ensure that the certification process is valid and role-based.”  If the exam that I took after taking their free “Mini-Course on the Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Program” is an indication of the rigor associated with their CPHIT certification exam, success in passing the exam could be quite a challenge.

I would encourage readers to take this free course and complete the computer based exam at the end of the course.  While barely successful (achieving a score of 72 where 70 is required to pass), I did obtain a “Certificate of Completion” that is suitable (once printed) for framing.

The next step will be for me to determine if there is funding at my College to pay the cost of taking the certification exam.  At a cost of $495 for the exam, plus an annual certification maintenance fee of $100, I have serious doubts as to whether funding is available given the State of California budget crisis.  Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to ask.  If the answer is “yes,” then I’ll have to deal with another issue.  That is the apparent lack of curriculum for self-study.