There is an interesting discussion as to the legitimacy of the PACS Certification and recertification process on another PACS discussion board. Some see it as unnecessary for our profession. The following is my response to those who say it is not necessary or worth it.
This is interesting to find that PACS Administrators themselves don’t see the value of certification. Comments such as “money grab”, “not enough value to the cert to maintain it”, or “not enough value to the cert to maintain it.” all seem self serving to me.
I have started to notice more and more that when people complain about something, there is often an underlying reason that it doesn’t serve them well regardless of the overall benefit to the entire community.
The purpose of a certification, the PACS certification in particular, is to demonstrate a basic aptitude about the PACS environment. Take a look at how far APCS Administration has come. It used to be the individual from radiology who was “good with computers” that was put in charge of an internal system that served nobody else but the radiology department. We have now grown to enterprise imaging where the systems that we all manage encompass anything that is deemed a medical image. We have graduated from radiology to *ology and need to keep up our knowledge with respect to the impressive evolution that face every day.
However much our systems evolve and try to move into alignment of standardized healthcare IT, there is still something that separates imaging informatics from HIS, RIS, ED, Pharmacy and other clinical systems and it is that distinction that I think we all thrive on.
The certification process should be seen as a method at which we can demonstrate that we can provide that extra level of expertise to a healthcare organization.
Sure, day to day activities such as server reboots, DICOM data editing for QA and workstation management are all skills that can be assessed during an interview but understanding why a particular device needs to be configured a certain way to successfully query a modality worklist or how to know what to ask a vendor from both a clinical and technical standpoint is what certification helps to represent.
As an organizational leader, wouldn’t you rather know that the individual you are hiring to implement you 2.5 million dollar PACS knows the ins and outs of radiology, imaging and IT before hiring him or her? Or would you rather wait until you are in the middle of RFP discussions to find that the individual you are expecting so much of can’t read a DICOM conformance statement to determine if the DICOM objects created by your new hi-tech equipment can even be sent into the PACS?
To the comment of, “I absolutely agree that certification is not necessarily correlated with ability”, it can also be said that you can have all the skill in the world, but if you don’t have the degree or certification to demonstrate it, you won’t be considered.
Between ABII and PARCA, PACS certification isn’t even 10 years old. 10 years from now, when an organization will not interview if you don’t have an imaging informatics certification, don’t find yourself in a position where you can’t put yourself in competition with others. Remember, this isn’t about you as an individual; it’s about supporting our profession and propelling us into an environment where we can demonstrate our knowledge.
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