DITEC

There are no dormitories on campus, no football team to root for, and no class president. DITEC students, however, do not seem to be phased by the absence of these traditional items of academia. For the past 12 years, the school has been graduating high-quality diagnostic imaging service professionals who are confident and well prepared to advance the medical service industry. The Solon, Ohio-based company offers more than 50 different fundamental, advanced, and product-specific courses and has an enrollment of more than 700 student weeks per year.

24x7 recently spoke with Manny Roman, president of DITEC, about what it means to train the future of the diagnostic imaging service industry and how a change in the way we learn has affected the way traditional courses are taught.

24x7: What needs does DITEC satisfy within the diagnostic-imaging industry?
Manny Roman: We provide high-quality, unbiased training. That’s all we do. We provide training and support services, but we don’t get into the other aspects of the industry, like parts and equipment sales. We have only one master, and that’s the training. We don’t try to sell the students on other things because our core competency is training.

24x7: As a training and educational center, how does DITEC stay ahead of technology so that the information offered to its students is current?
Roman: It takes about 10 weeks of development time for a 1-week course. Before we expend the money and the manpower to develop and then offer a course, three things have to happen: 1) There has to be an installed base. In other words, there have to be a lot of those particular machines installed before we develop that particular course. 2) There has to be a willingness for people to come to our training on those machines. 3) There have to be enough machines coming off the installed base to allow for parts to be available. If there is not an installed base, willingness to train, and parts availability, then we won’t even offer a product-specific course for that item.

24x7: The company has recently partnered with Penn State New Kensington’s (Upper Burrell, Pa) continuing education department. What does the collaboration provide to the field of medical technicians?
Roman: Through the state of Ohio, we provide a diploma program, consisting of 30 credit hours. What we wanted to do was have milestones in the career path of a normal diagnostic imaging service professional. We wanted some recognition of accumulated training; although we provide a certificate of attendance or certificate of completion for each of our courses, we didn’t have a means of recognizing that an individual has reached certain levels of competency.

We partnered with Penn State New Kensington’s continuing education department to provide a formal document stating that a student has reached each of three levels of competency while enrolled in the program. Students in the program, while working toward their official diploma, receive three certificates, each one demonstrating a higher level of competency and commitment to the educational process.

24x7: With regard to the diagnostics service industry, what are some difficult issues DITEC faces, and how does the company overcome these issues?
Roman: One of the issues we are really wrestling with now is that of distance education. A lot of courses, regardless of the industry, are being taught via the Internet. Our problem is that many aspects of our program don’t lend themselves to being done without the systems in place. For example, in our fundamentals courses, we have 11 bays of equipment installed here at the facility, such as x-ray rooms identical to what students will find in a hospital. If we were to put some of these fundamentals on CD-ROM or the Internet, we would be lacking the hands-on piece of the course.

Most of our courses are at least 50% hands on. Additionally, most of our students are kinesthetic learners, meaning they learn by doing. Watching a CD-ROM cannot get someone zapped by electricity. We believe that in a strong course, you still need to have the students actually work on the equipment and see the size of the machines.

Currently, we are wrestling with how we can expand our services into the distance education arena and maybe even more worldwide. In the future we’re going to be identifying the items that lend themselves to being done through distance education. Some fundamental issues can be learned alone by an individual, and by teaching these fundamentals this way we’re hoping to reduce the requisite time for people to actually spend in our Solon training facility. There is a problem with this form of distance learning, however. At DITEC, we like to talk about something in a lecture setting and then go do a lab on it. It’s very difficult to have a class lecture and discussion and then go to the lab to practice what was just discussed without the other people and the equipment.

I’m not sure we’re going to be able to do entire courses via distance learning, but maybe in the areas of clinical laboratory, hematology, and chemistry analyzers we can do certain fundamentals that way.

24x7: What are some specifics about DITEC’s programs?
Roman: We provide more than 50 different courses, fundamental, advanced, and product-specific courses. Not all the courses we do are advertised in our normal training schedule. Some of the things we do are what we call closed-door courses, in which someone will call us and ask us to do training for a particular machine, or something that is a little outdated. We’ve also taken our fundamental courses and combined them for a shorter instruction time and higher intensity for groups of people.

As far as the number of students, we do about 700 student weeks per year. The way we calculate our enrollment is that one student attending a 2-week course is calculated as two student weeks.

Over the past several years, we have seen a substantial increase in enrollment for our fundamentals courses. A while back there was an exodus of people who went to the fields of IT and IS. As hospitals started doing more with networking their systems with such technology as PACS, a lot of people in our industry left or retired. As a result, there is a shortage of imaging service technicians. Today, facilities are having to make the decision on whether to make or buy their service professionals. Since most of our students come from in-house hospital groups, it looks as though a lot of management personnel are saying they can’t buy it so they’re going to have to make it.

24X7: What would you like readers to learn about DITEC?
Roman: We have a strong commitment to our service training and support. Every student who leaves our door with a certificate from us is carrying our reputation. Over the past 12 years, we’ve worked very hard to establish a good reputation for our company and our students.

Because we, too, are consumers of the health care that we support, I think it is important for people to realize that doing a good job is not an option, it’s a requirement because the next person on that table could be someone who is near and dear to us.