The Arch
Collaborative
The Arch Collaborative
Through collaboration, measurement, and member cooperation, organizations can unlock the potential of EMR solutions to revolutionize healthcare efficiency and care-quality improvements.
What is the Arch Collaborative?
“The Arch Collaborative provides insight to allow organizations to focus resources that facilitate the needs of their most valued asset—the physicians! The Collaborative provides understanding, from the physician perspective, that the EMR is a tool that needs to be mastered to allow physicians to care for their patients efficiently.” – Tom Moran, CMIO, Northwestern Memorial Hospital
What happens when over 90 provider organizations from all over the world listen to feedback from tens of thousands of clinicians regarding their EMR experience and then work together to improve that experience?
- Healthcare providers begin to be grateful for the EMR and see it as a tool for delivering better care.
- Healthcare leaders commit that they will not settle. They refuse to resign themselves to living with EMR frustrations and eventual clinician burnout.
- We all learn that the drivers of EMR dissatisfaction aren’t what we assumed. We learn that education, teamwork, and change management—not more technology—will lead users to EMR success.
We know fixing the EMR is the start of a healthcare revolution.
Help cure healthcare. Every healthcare organization should listen to the feedback of their clinicians and compare it to industry benchmarks. Learn how you can do this free of charge.
See the early results of this effort. Then move from the sidelines to participate by joining the Arch Collaborative!
Elements of the Arch Collaborative
See examples of the base questionnaire and deliverables
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Elements of the Arch Collaborative
KLAS firmly believes that it is difficult to improve processes without measurement. In response to this belief, KLAS encourages all provider organizations to participate in the Arch Collaborative. Each organization may use KLAS’ EMR-measurement questionnaire and receive benchmarking results free of charge after participating for the first time. Repeated usage of the questionnaire and KLAS-facilitated collaboration with other organizations requires a provider organization to be an Executive Partner with KLAS. All participating organizations and Executive Partners are encouraged to use information collected from the Collaborative to align EMR stakeholders with appropriate governance and target the highest-impact options for EMR improvement in provider organizations and the industry.
Measurement
Collaborative participants use the same* base user questionnaire to find the answers to key questions about EMR usability. The participating organization sends this survey to all EMR users in the organization.
Each organization also participates in an executive interview with KLAS that is used to benchmark the organization against peer organizations.
*All participating organizations can make deletions and vernacular changes to the survey, and Executive Partners can add custom questions.
Benchmarking
KLAS hosts the survey and benchmarks an organization’s results against those of the other participating organizations. All participating organizations receive these results in the form of benchmark charts. Executive Partners receive these results in the form of benchmark charts and a personalized benchmark report delivered to the organization 45–60 days after the survey’s cutoff date.
Collaboration
The Arch Collaborative will facilitate collaboration between Executive Partners, their vendors, and other Collaborative participants through best practice reports, webinars, participation at a yearly conference, and other methods requested by Executive Partners. If the provider organization requests, EMR vendors will also be engaged and provided with insights on how to deliver EMR environments.
Can I Improve EMR
Satisfaction and Efficiency?
With over 40,000 evaluations collected to date across dozens of organizations, caregiver EMR users are providing clear feedback that they will be satisfied with their EMRs when they meet the providers’ specific caregiving-workflow needs. This research is busting the myth that EMR dissatisfaction is largely a result of factors outside the healthcare organization’s control (user age, organization size, physician burnout, etc.).
The Collaborative research is aimed at continual learning, but some factors with the potential to increase user efficiency and satisfaction have already been clearly identified. Some of these factors include:
- Effective, Ongoing Training: For many physicians, ”training” means getting locked into a room for a couple of hours to learn a few things that might be helpful. However, the most effective organizations are finding ways to engage physicians early and often so that they learn from each other and trained leaders. The link between training and success with an EMR is dramatic.
- EMR Personalization: The majority of EMR users accept and use the configurations that are originally handed to them. Users who take the time to personalize the EMR to their needs are three to five times more likely to be highly satisfied with the EMR.
- EMR Governance/Physician Engagement: Effective organizations have found ways to quickly incorporate end-user feedback into the EMR-optimization process. Less effective organizations struggle to get anyone to show up to governance meetings.