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