Posted by 
By David S. Partridge, CRA, FAHRA
Everyone has a different way to measure their performance. Athletes measure themselves by beating their rival, musicians by the number of platinum records they have earned and now people measure themselves by the number of Instagram followers they have. For most people these measurements provide an internal drive to succeed whether they are shared with the world or kept them to themselves.
Imaging performance is documented in so many ways, and now more and more of these metrics are becoming public. The Radiology Administration Certification Commission (RACC) is not immune to performance measurement and I am excited to spread the news about our results so far this year.
The RACC has three important goals established for this year.
GOAL 1 – Improve the practice tests available to the candidates preparing for the CRA examination
We have completed the review of the previous pretests and re-referenced them to the current textbooks. This 70-question practice test is available through the website at www.crainfo.org. The second test of all new questions has been completed and will be available on the website soon.
GOAL 2 – Evaluate our Ideal Candidate Profile
We have begun analyzing anonymized data about the candidates that have taken recent examinations to determine if the ideal examinee profile established in 2002 is still the right standard. We are making significant progress and are on track to be complete by the end of the year.
GOAL 3 – Improved Marketing and growth of recognition of the CRA Credential and its value
One of the large pieces of this goal occurred at the AHRA annual meeting, where we had incredible interest at the CRA booth. Between the booth and the CRA reception we had 10 very lucky winners of CRA phone chargers and were able to give away hundreds of Post-it® notes advertising the CRA so that people will be reminded about the opportunity to spread the information throughout their organization. We were also very excited to learn that 62 future CRAs participated in the CRA exam workshop on Sunday at the meeting.
We did have a couple of challenges at the annual meeting. Because everyone was so engaged in the networking at the CRA reception, I did not make sure to introduce each of the commissioners and I apologize for that. Hopefully everyone got a chance to meet all the team members on the RACC. Also, our reception was originally planned to be held outdoors – but Mother Nature did not cooperate so, we moved to plan B – an indoor reception!
I’m pleased to share, that at this year’s annual meeting in Denver, we were able to recognize Wanda Coker for her 5 years as the AHRA Board liaison to the RACC. Wanda has been a tremendous asset to our team.
The RACC will be working with the new AHRA marketing strategist, Kurt Laffy in the coming months to better understand our place in the health care and the human resources markets and to discover the best ways to improve the recognition of our Certification Program. Although we’ve had a slow start with our marketing goals, we are coming on strong and making progress.
Overall the RACC has had a great year and is on pace to be very successful with all our goals. I hope you and your team are all headed in the same direction.
David Partridge, CRA, FAHRA is an account executive with Prestige Medical Imaging in Columbus, Ohio. He serves as the 2019 RACC Chair. He can be reached at dave.partridge@pmiteam.net
LINK 