The Standard

Are you HL7 certified?

HL7 offers certification in its primary standards for health information technology including Version 2 (V2), Version 3 (V3), Clinical Document Architecture (CDA®) and HL7 Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR®). The testing is designed to help professionals achieve industry-recognized levels of proficiency and expertise.

Almost 5,000 HL7 members, nonmembers and students from around the world have been HL7 certified in one or more of the standards. If you're one them, here are five ways to market yourself with your achievement.

1. Add to your resume

Adding certifications to your resume is critical in making yourself stand out from other applicants – whether it's for a new job or for a new position in your current organization.

Your HL7 certification as a CDA Specialist, V2 Control Specialist, V3 RIM Specialist or HL7 FHIR Proficient should be added under a skills section or even a designated certifications section on your resume.

2. Add to LinkedIn

If you haven’t updated your LinkedIn profile in a while, now is the time. There are over 500 million users on LinkedIn, and 70% are from outside the U.S.*

Skills section

The first place to add your HL7 certifications is under the Skills section.

• On the top nav bar, click the “Me” icon
• Select “View profile”
• Click the “Add profile section” button
• Select the “+” sign under Skills
• Type in your skills such as “HL7 Standards”, “CDA”, “HL7 FHIR”, etc.
• Then click the “Add” button

Listing five skills or more in your LinkedIn profile will get you up to 17 times more profile views.*

Certifications section

LinkedIn claims that members with a certification get 5x more profile views. Simply click this button to get started:

Then, follow these steps:

• Add your certification name
• Under Certification authority, type in Health Level Seven International
• Click “Save” button

3) Add to your website

HL7 offers digital badges for download for each of the certifications at badgelist.com/HL7. To download, follow these steps:

• Click on the desired badge
• Click “Join this badge” in the upper right corner
• Sign in if you have a Badgelist account or create a new account
• Go back to badgelist.com/HL7 and click on the desired badge again
• Click on the Proof of Participation box to add your information

Once you have your badge, you can add this to your personal website. You may also be able to add your badge and/or your HL7 certification title to your employee bio on your company’s website.

 4) Add to your social profiles

Once you have downloaded your badge, you can add them to your social profiles in channels such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. You can share the badge as a post with a message and include hashtags such as #HL7, #HL7certified, #healthIT and #interoperability.

Another way to share in social media is to add the digital badge to your cover image.

 5) Add to your email signature

Your HL7 certification and digital badge can easily be incorporated into your daily correspondence. The average person receives 124 business emails per day. That’s a great opportunity to influence your contacts’ perception of you. 

For an easy way to generate an email signature, try HubSpot’s email generator tool. Here is an example of one of the layouts offered:

How to get HL7 certified

If you're interested in getting on the path to certification, HL7 offers training for individuals and groups. Options include live online classes, self-paced courses, on-demand webinars and face-to-face events. 

For HL7 FHIR, a great place to start is with the FHIR Fundamentals four-week course. Registration is now open and the next course begins July 18, 2019. 

Fore more information on HL7 certification, click here. For questions, please reach out to me at sadhana@hl7.org. 

*https://www.omnicoreagency.com/linkedin-statistics/