The American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) provides informatics nurse certification to certain registered nurses. Qualified candidates have education and experience and then must pass an informatics nurse certification exam.
Prior to the application for the informatics nursing exam, certification hopefuls must have an active U.S. registered-nurse license or the equivalent in another country and two full years of experience as a registered nurse in any field. Applicants must also have at least a bachelor’s degree in nursing or some field relevant to informatics nursing.
Other requirement for informatics nurse certification include 30 hours of continuing education in the past three years plus 2000 hours of work experience in informatics nursing over that same period. However, there are two ways to substitute those 2000 hours. The first is to have 1000 hours plus 12 semester hours of graduate-level credits in informatics nursing. The second is completion of an informatics-nursing graduate program plus at least 200 hours of a practicum while supervised by faculty.
After qualifying, applicants may download an application at the American Nurses Credentialing Center website. See the link in the Resources to go directly to this informatics-nurse certification application form. For 2011, the application fee is $395 for nonmembers, $270 for American Nurses Association members, and an additional $125 for international testing.
Caution: Before submitting the certification application, you should be close to ready to take your informatics-nurse exam. Make sure you have plenty of time to prepare for the test using the tips and resources below.
The exam reference list is the most invaluable tool in your arsenal for studying to become a certified informatics nurse. If you purchase these books and learn all the material, you greatly increase your chances of passing and getting certified.
The content outline is helpful in streamlining your exam preparation. You can look at the outline first to get each topic and then look up that topic in the references. Go back and forth until you have studied all the relevant topics appearing on this test to become an informatics nurse.
There are also some practice questions at the ANCC website. Try to answer those after you have studied (not before) so you can assess your progress towards passing the certification test.
Resources:
American Nurses Credentialing Center: Informatics Nurse Certification Application
ANCC: Exam Reference List
ANCC: Informatics Nurse Certification Exam Content Outline