What Does it Take to Achieve EHR Mastery?

With the years-long buying frenzy of EHRs beginning to cool, many in healthcare IT are coming back up for air after their implementations.

After their first post-go-live deep breath, these leaders are now looking to stabilize and innovate on top of their new core systems.

Getting an entire health system to adopt all the facets of a new EHR is complex enough. Convincing that same group to put the effort in required to become master-users is another story.

Yet, it’s necessary for healthcare systems trying to leverage technology to achieve improved outcomes and quality.

It’s no secret that many current-state EHRs aren’t living up to the utopian dreams that preceded them. So how can clinicians and clinical leadership take kludgy systems and create patient-impacting tools?

 It All Starts with Training

Sometimes, it really does come back to the basics. Many providers have opted to chase bright, shiny solutions to EHR optimization such as, voice recognition software, scribes and consultants. But as the Arch Collaborative has gathered an ever-larger data set, we’ve found that training impacts satisfaction to a greater degree than almost anything else.

Approximately 50% of the variance in a clinicians rating of their satisfaction with the EHR can be explained by how they rate their training.

This, of course, begs the question: how do you optimize the training for your clinicians? Thankfully, those organizations who’ve succeeded with training have done so without huge budget expenditures. There are three ways to impact training positively.

1. Focus on the who, instead of the what. The quality of the trainer matters more than how your training is structured.
2. Make engagement an expectation. We’ve found that at least 7 hours of initial EHR education and a minimum of 3 hours follow-up annually is the tipping point to maximize success.
3. Deliver training that adds value and yields high demand. Several organizations within the Collaborative have found success in an off-site training model.

Additionally, there are a few things the Arch Collaborative has found to be less impactful:

1. Making ongoing (not initial) training mandatory has been found to only increase satisfaction by 3.9%.
2. Insisting clinicians teach clinicians. Over half of satisfied organizations used non-clinician trainers
3. Offering a test-out option. Organizations only see minimal increases in satisfaction scores when they allow clinicians to test-out of trainings.

If you would like to see the data behind these insights, you can access the EHR Mastery: Impact of Training Report.