Targeted Training: Promoting EHR Efficiency

Whether it is implementing a new EHR or transitioning to a new EHR, your organization is undoubtedly investing a significant amount of capital and utilizing many of your organization’s resources and time to complete that project. With the ultimate goal being the positive impact on patient safety, clinical and operational efficiency, and the financial health of the organization, implementing an EHR is a crucial project to get right. Although the technical implementation of an EHR is incredibly important, a solid provider training plan can make or break the long term success of an EHR system.

When taking on an implementation, most organizations are faced with challenges such as a fixed budget and a specified timeline. Alongside these, and often competing with, is the question of functionality, workflows, and training. Organizations have to determine what functionality they want to bring online and how that functionality matches up or works with their workflows. Then becomes the question of how to train their organization on this new system successfully and effectively. All of these aspects are important when trying to come up with the best solution to implement.

Despite the effort and investment, overall, the EHR has not lived up to its potential. Organizations often find that the sought-after goals have not been realized and have had unintended negative impacts on the practice of medicine, a provider’s specific role, and the disruption of work-life balance. In looking at an EHR system as a whole, many users will jump to poor technical usability as the root of these failings. However, wide variations exist within all EHR customer bases and critical gaps exist in how users actually understand the EHR they are using, how to use it, and how to optimize how they would use it. For example, users often don’t know how to enter information in the right place or efficiently find the information they are looking for, so they end up just spending their day fighting to get through the EHR experience to provide patient care. This usage method impacts how they feel about the care they are giving and their professional aptitude.