New certification recognizes growing importance of DICOM

Image used by permission DICOM committee

PARCA eNews – April 1, 2017 – The PACS Administrators Registry and Certification Association (PARCA) has announced a new certification for PACS and IT professionals. 

The new DICOM certification will replace the Certified PACS Interface Analyst (CPIA) certification and will more specifically focus the course material and the exam on DICOM, the international standard for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine.

Charles Willis, PhD, DABR, president of PARCA said it was time to add a certification focused on DICOM.

Charles E Willis,
M.S., Ph.D., FAAPM

“Without an understanding of DICOM, you can’t appreciate the meaning of the conformance statements and the impact that they have on whether a device will provide the service you expect,” Willis said. “Given the importance of the DICOM standard and its continued evolution, it has been a recurring educational topic at many national scientific and technical meetings including RSNA, SIIM, AAPM, SPIE, AHRA, and HIMMS, however, there doesn’t seem to be a program offering certification in DICOM proficiency. That’s why PARCA Board has decided to offer it.”

Herman Oosterwijk, who has been involved in PARCA and training for two decades, spearheaded the new certification and originally tried to get the DICOM committee to offer certification in 1998, but the committee did not want to get into the certification business. Since then, Oosterwijk says, the DICOM standard has evolved and added several extensions adding to the breadth and depth of knowledge needed to fully understand and work with DICOM. 

“So I went to the DICOM committee again last December (2016), and they said again ‘no, no, we want to be a standards organization,’” Oosterwijk said in an interview, “we don't want to get involved in certification, but there is nothing that prevents you or some other organization from doing certification,’ so I said ok, that's my plan B. I'll go back to PARCA and approach them with the idea.”

Herman Oosterwijk, MS,
MBA, president OTech

Asked what has changed to make a DICOM certification a viable stand-alone certification, Oosterwijk said that a lot has changed in medical imaging in general and with the new DICOMweb extension; it is likely that DICOM will become an even more important standard in the future. That said, he envisions that the new certification will be pursued by PACS administrators, as they could use additional knowledge, especially to assist in troubleshooting connections, and he also sees it appealing to the many new people coming to DICOM.

“First of all there are a lot more people involved in medical imaging who are not in radiology, and while they all know what DICOM is, few have the depth of experience with it that people in radiology have,” Oosterwijk says. “There are a lot of new applications that are starting to use DICOM, all the ‘ologies,’ ophthalmology, cardiology, and also there is a lot of excitement around DICOMweb, which is equivalent to FHIR which allows you to use a smart phone and use a DICOM app protocol to insert the image into the patient's medical imaging record.” 

As a consequence, Oosterwijk said there was a growing need to provide a more organized approach for learning about DICOM and studying its specifications. To that end, his company OTech, has revamped the course materials and study guide and refocused the training on the requirements specified by the DICOM certification. 

Sjoerd van Schie is DICOM & Computer Networking Specialist at Hitachi Medical Systems America in Ohio. He has been involved with PACS and DICOM for much of his career and has been involved in training Field Service and Biomedical Engineers inside and outside of Hitachi for the past 15 years. He sees training people at Hitachi in DICOM and networking as a matter of improving customer support.

Sjoerd van Schie, DICOM
specialist 

“I had been teaching ultrasound for customer support at Hitachi for some time,” van Schie said, “and then I proposed that I teach DICOM in network computing as well, because I noticed there was a little lack of knowledge within the company and felt it was important to improve customer support and they agreed.” 

Outside of work, van Schie taught classes at ITT TECH after hours and was teaching computer structure and logic and then moved into the application layer, which included DICOM, and came to teaching DICOM in network computing.

As to the new DICOM certification, van Schie agrees that the time has come for a DICOM certification. He has noticed that there have been a growing number of people in healthcare IT with responsibility for DICOM problems and they don’t fully understand the standard, and can sometimes end up making problems worse.

“Often these people get the responsibility for solving DICOM problems thrown into their laps and they don't know what to do with it.” van Schie says. “It is a serious job you don't do on the side. I think having a DICOM certification will reflect the seriousness of the whole DICOM world.”

Van Schie says that in the medical healthcare industry networking and DICOM go hand in hand, and one cannot work without the other. 

“They are both extremely essential, and so you have to know how to do the troubleshooting,” van Schie says, “to understand what you are doing and how are you doing it. So I think for this certification, it is not just a title; it has to have the value that comes with the knowledge and experience you get with certification. The certification can reflect the competence and solid understanding of a person about DICOM knowledge in conjunction with medical networking, which are inseparably connected.”

The PARCA DICOM certification courses, study materials and exams became available on April 15. People with CPIA certification will have the opportunity to take the course and exam at a discount.