How to Become a Telemetry Technician

The National Telemetry Association focuses on helping medical professionals and aspiring telemetry technicians expand their skills in the field of telemetry by providing online, self-paced telemetry training courses with nationally and internationally recognized certifications since 2010.

For those who may have happened upon this article, you may be wondering what exactly a Telemetry Technician does. The telemetry technician is a very important person who sits and watches your loved ones cardiac monitors day and night. The telemetry technician carefully and diligently watches each patients cardiac monitor to see if there are any abnormalities and then contact the nurse of physician immediately.

Basically, the telemetry technician saves lives daily. You may not see them or even notice that they are in the background watching your loved ones monitors, but take heart, they are there.

So let's take a deeper look at what a telemetry technicians job entails. Imagine a dark room filled with monitors with glowing green heart rhythms on a black background. It is not unlike waling into a Television station. There are no lights to speak of other than the light emanating from the monitors. There may be 20 monitors in one room with 5 patients rhythms per monitor. If you do the math, that would be fifty patients to just one telemetry technician.

Now if you are thinking what I am thinking, that's a lot of patients rhythms for only one telemetry technician to watch over the course of an 8 to 12 hour shift. Right? Well, the truth is that the amount of patients per telemetry technician varies from hospital to hospital. There is no standard set for how many patients monitors one telemetry technician can safely watch.

Some hospitals may have only 10 patients per monitor technician. While the number of patients to telemetry technician varies, the knowledge base of the telemetry technician must remain solid.

The National Telemetry Association specializes in training telemetry technicians to be proficient in the reading and interpreting of cardiac dysrhythmias and understanding how to recognize scenarios in which the patients vital signs are affected.

The National Telemetry Association's Telemetry Technician Course usually take about 8 weeks to complete. In that time the student will learn to recognize a multitude of cardiac dysrhythmias and understand how these dysrhythmias affect patients heart rate, respiration, oxygen saturation and blood pressure. Students of the N.T.A. will also need to learn about specialty medications that are used regularly in those with cardiac problems, such as Digoxin, Beta-Blockers, Alpha-Blockers, Calcium Channel Blockers and diuretics. The N.T.A. stresses to every student that the most important concept to remember is that the monitors that they are watching are not just monitors but patients, people lives and loved ones of others. The N.T.A. believes that the more knowledge a telemetry technician has, the better that they will be at recognizing dangerous rhythms and prevent patients conditions from deteriorating

If you are interested in joining the field of Telemetry and would like to learn more, you can reach out to the National Telemetry Association either through their website: https://nationaltelemetryassociation.org or give them a call at

1-888-461-3029.