Pursuing healthcare IT certifications

Having been an IT Consultant for 9+ years, I have yet to be asked by a client or prospective client about what certifications I hold. I've hired and fired people with certifications and they are no more competent then anyone else I've worked with.The only people who care about certification are vendors. Usually the vendors want "someone" within the organization to pass their certification test so they can claim to have "certified" resellers, etc.

What does a certification suppose to represent? Presumably, a certification is to represent mastery of a product/solution/technology. Does the current certification testing methods actually test a "mastery" of any given topic? In my opinion, the majority of certifications and certified individuals I've encountered don't truely reflect a true "mastery" of anything. Typically, the tests are very narrowly focused and concentrate on minutia that can be found in a good reference manaul and committed to memory through rout. A proof of this: How many people do you know that have a "major company" certification that don't know which side of keyboard to type on? I know too many!

I personally believe that certifications are over valued and over sold to customers/clients. A certification guarantees the client nothing! Is the product/solution/technology going to solve their problem? Is the vendor that sold me the product/solution/technolgy going to be around to service me later? This is what the customer/client is really after.

Certification can have value and should but currently, in my opinion, have little to none.

For the record, I have three certification from IBM for their iSeries product line.