Originally published on JS PACS, June 12, 2009.
There is an interesting discussion about 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 not worth it.
It is interesting to find that PACS administrators themselves don’t see the value of certification. Comments such as “money grab” and “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 it doesn’t serve them well, regardless of the overall benefit to the community.
The purpose of a certification, and the PACS certification in particular, is to demonstrate a basic aptitude in the PACS environment. Take a look at how far PACS administration has come. It used to be the individual from radiology who was “good with computers” who was put in charge of an internal system that served nobody but the radiology department. We have now grown to enterprise imaging, where the systems we manage encompass anything deemed a medical image. We have graduated from radiology to “-ology,” and we need to keep our knowledge up with the impressive evolution we face every day.
However much our systems evolve and move into alignment with 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 I think we all thrive on.
The certification process should be seen as a method by which we 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 in an interview. But understanding why a particular device needs to be configured a certain way to successfully query a modality worklist, or knowing what to ask a vendor from both a clinical and a technical standpoint, is what certification helps represent.
As an organizational leader, wouldn’t you rather know that the individual you are hiring to implement your $2.5 million 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 whether the DICOM objects created by your new high-tech equipment can even be sent into the PACS?
To the comment 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 ten years old. Ten years from now, when an organization will not interview you without an imaging informatics certification, don’t find yourself unable to compete. 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.