About CPHIMS Drills: what this site is, and what it won’t print

Who this is for, and what it actually is

The reader this site is built for already works in health IT — a systems analyst, a clinical informaticist, an applications manager, someone running an EHR optimisation queue — and is deciding whether to buy the HIMSS Review Guide, pay for a course, or just start answering questions. This site is the third option, and it is free.

What you get: a browser quiz of 90 questions weighted to the published 25/20/30/25 blueprint, the blueprint itself decoded domain by domain, an eligibility comparison at CAHIMS vs CPHIMS, and an honest sort of the wider healthcare IT certification field for people who are not yet sure CPHIMS is the credential they want.

What you do not get: a video course, a downloadable PDF, an email capture, or the HIMSS CPHIMS Review Guide. HIMSS sells that book. This is not a copy of it, not a summary of it, and not a free version of it — the pages here are written from the public candidate handbook and the published blueprint, which anybody can read.

One correction worth making up front

CPHIMS is a health information and management systems credential — the professional layer above the systems: governance, procurement, implementation, privacy and security, project and budget work. It is not a nursing credential, and a few certification catalogues file it under nursing. If you arrived from one of those lists looking for a clinical qualification, the domain weights on the study guide will settle it in about ten seconds: 30% of the exam is systems management and 25% is management and leadership.

Where the facts come from

Every exam fact on this site traces to the CPHIMS candidate handbook effective 1 May 2024: the four domains and their 25/20/30/25 weights, the three eligibility routes, two hours for 100 scored multiple-choice questions, scaled scoring with a pass point of 600, the 90-day authorisation window, the 60-day wait before a retake and the re-application required after a third failure, and recertification at 45 continuing-education hours every three years with two of them in ethics.

The CAHIMS handbook supplies the comparison on CAHIMS vs CPHIMS. Pearson VUE's HIMSS pages supply the delivery detail — test centre or online proctored, your choice at booking. Where a page states something the handbook does not, it says so in the sentence.

Where the questions come from

The 90 practice questions are written to the published blueprint and weighted to it. They are not retired HIMSS items, they were not scraped from a live form, and nobody here has sat in front of one. They are practice at the shape of the exam — a stem with a plausible distractor set, at recall, applied and analysis levels — not a prediction of what you will be asked.

Handbooks get revised. When HIMSS revises this one, these pages go stale before anyone here notices — the eligibility grid and the recertification rules are the parts most likely to move. If you are looking at something that no longer matches the current handbook, the corrections desk is the fix, and it is the reason that page exists.

Six things this site won’t print

Most CPHIMS pages on the open web open with a fee, a pass rate and the percentage you supposedly need. This site prints none of the three, and the reason is the same each time: the number is either unpublished, contested, or not a real quantity.

The same rule governs everything else here. If a fact cannot be traced to the handbook, to HIMSS or to Pearson VUE, it does not go on the page — which is why some sections end earlier than you might expect them to.

If something here is wrong, stale or missing a source, say so: the corrections desk takes wrong answers and wrong facts alike, and the privacy page covers what happens to a page view here, which is close to nothing.