The ROI for Improving Your Clinicians’ Experience 2025
Championing Your Clinicians’ Experience Drives Crucial Outcomes
In today’s rapidly evolving healthcare environment, there is mounting pressure for healthcare organizations to carefully consider where to invest their limited funds and strategic resources. To warrant investment, organizational initiatives must clearly demonstrate value, efficiency, and long-term impact. As organizations face high demand for care from an aging population, high burnout rates among clinicians, and a retiring workforce, initiatives to champion the clinician experience matter now more than ever. Clinicians represent one of healthcare organization’s largest investments, and organizations who fail to prioritize a positive clinician experience will increasingly find it difficult to recruit and retain clinicians. This report examines insights from 16 healthcare organizations that actively prioritize the clinician experience to achieve mission-critical goals around staff retention, care quality, and operational efficiency.
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500,000+ clinicians worldwide
Access the feedback of
500,000+ clinicians worldwide
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Potential for Clinician Turnover Is High & Comes with a Steep Cost
Clinicians represent one of healthcare organizations’ largest investments, yet many organizations fail to intentionally nurture a positive clinician experience, missing crucial opportunities to maximize their return. Affecting clinicians and patients alike, the clinician experience cannot be ignored, as poor experiences are directly tied to burnout and turnover.
Intentionally Prioritizing the Clinician Experience Drives Measurable ROI
By focusing on the clinician experience, the interviewed organizations hoped to achieve a variety of tangible, high-impact outcomes, including increased clinician efficiency, decreased burnout, engaged clinicians, and improved patient safety. As a result of their deliberate efforts, these organizations have achieved what they set out to do (see chart below).
Decreased Clinician Burnout and Turnover
Intentionally reducing burnout reinvigorates clinicians’ spark to practice medicine and leads to the following benefits, which are especially crucial given current staffing shortages:
- Reduced costs associated with turnover and recruiting
- Enhanced organizational appeal to clinician talent
Increased Clinician Efficiency
Investments in clinician efficiency, such as workflow optimization and workflow education, empower clinicians to get back to what they love doing: spending time caring for patients. In the face of staffing shortages, efficiency improvements also lead to:
- Faster task completion
- Faster chart-closure rates
- Fewer duplicate tests
- Increased patient volumes
- A more engaged workforce
Improved Patient Safety and/or Clinical Outcomes
Interviewed organizations consistently tie patient safety/clinical outcomes to clinician satisfaction, including:
- Improved medication safety
- Higher adherence to safety protocols
- Reduced penalties from unmet quality requirements
- Better patient access
Organizations typically measure outcomes via things like observable performance metrics, clinical data, and patient surveys. Burnout levels are assessed through clinician surveys and turnover rates, while patient loyalty is measured via methods such as a Net Promotor Score.
Executive Perspectives: Why We Invest in Our Clinicians
“We understand that enhancing the clinician experience is essential, not just a luxury. Clinicians are central to providing safe, high-quality care, and their satisfaction directly influences patient outcomes, operational efficiency, and our ability to attract and retain top talent. By investing in the clinician experience—whether through better tools, more efficient workflows, or targeted education—we are not just improving the daily lives of our teams; we are enabling them to spend more time on what they love—caring for patients. In the face of competing priorities, it boils down to this: when clinicians thrive, the entire organization benefits.” —CMIO
“Culture is a soft metric that is highly consequential. It’s not the kind of thing people can enter in a spreadsheet to prove a monetary ROI, but culture is a massive metric. Our culture has improved because we invested in improving the clinicians’ experience. There are innumerable factors to culture, but we have created a strong presence with our providers. We let them know we are listening to them and making changes. We get in front of the providers every quarter to let them know about major changes that are coming based on the pain points they have reported. I think this matters a lot.” —Physician and director of clinical informatics
Multifaceted Strategies with the EHR at the Heart Drive Successful Efforts to Improve the Clinician Experience
To enhance the clinician experience, the 16 interviewed healthcare organizations deployed a multifaceted strategy that includes people, processes, and technology. These organizations focus on various technological areas to improve the clinician experience—and the EHR is at the heart of those strategies. The EHR experience is crucial to clinicians’ experiences, considering the significant amount of time clinicians spend in it. Ultimately, optimizing clinicians’ use of the EHR is essential to improving their experience at your organization.
100% of the interviewed healthcare leaders agree that improving the clinician experience with the EHR is vital.
The interviewed organizations focus on three main principles when enhancing their clinicians’ EHR satisfaction:
Strengthening the EHR’s technical foundation
Enhancing the foundational infrastructure of the EHR is essential to supporting clinicians, who want to focus on caring for patients rather than stalling while waiting to log in to the EHR. Interviewed organizations focus on delivering a seamless login experience for clinicians, maintaining up-to-date equipment, and ensuring robust network and Wi-Fi performance to minimize clinicians’ frustration of waiting on the EHR to respond.
Prioritizing professional development through EHR education
Interviewed organizations invest in robust EHR onboarding and ongoing training, emphasizing strong workflow education, trainings provided by specialists, and a strong support structure so clinicians feel confident using the EHR and put their best foot forward in front of patients. It is hard for clinicians to be great with patients if they haven’t mastered the EHR.
Establishing strong EHR governance structures that foster a culture of clinician engagement
Clinicians feel supported and connected when their voices are included in EHR decisions as they help build meaningful changes to streamline documentation and workflows, leading to not only great patient relationships but also great relationships with organizational leadership and IT.
Beyond the core EHR program, respondents elevate the clinician EHR experience by leveraging the following technology and resources (includes only technologies mentioned by at least two respondents):
Measuring Clinicians’ Experience, Especially with the EHR, Promotes & Accelerates Improvement
The 16 interviewed healthcare organizations participate in the Arch Collaborative EHR Experience Survey to:
Accelerate the success of their EHR improvement efforts by highlighting the areas specific to their organization that will drive the most impactful improvements
Understand where they perform well while receiving clear direction on where to prioritize their efforts to achieve higher clinician EHR satisfaction
Build a strong culture of collaboration and trust that leads to better alignment between frontline EHR users and organizational leadership
Leverage opportunities to reduce burnout and turnover that might otherwise be missed
Enhancing clinician EHR satisfaction does not necessarily require a significant financial investment. As illustrated in the Arch Collaborative report titled Easy Lifts for Quickly Improving EHR Satisfaction, many high-performing organizations have achieved meaningful improvements by strategically reallocating existing resources and implementing small but high-impact interventions.
Benefits of Arch Collaborative Membership
Data from the Arch Collaborative Executive Scorecard to help organizations secure buy-in and resources from leadership teams to improve EHR satisfaction and highlight financial risks of not properly addressing the EHR experience.
Access to a tremendous library of best practices through a robust library of case studies, reports, webinars, and provider and nursing guidebooks. These resources include successfully executed interventions to improve clinicians’ EHR satisfaction and overcome barriers.
The opportunity to connect directly with other members to understand how they solved similar challenges. These opportunities include the annual KLAS Arch Collaborative Learning Summit and topic-based quarterly networking sessions.
Prioritize your clinicians’ EHR experience by joining the KLAS Arch Collaborative. Find more information here.
Executives Explain Why They Measure Their Clinicians’ Experience
“The Arch Collaborative EHR Experience Survey helped us peel back the layers; I don’t know that we would have recognized the importance of the ancillary implications to the EMR experience. We were so focused on looking at the EMR data and how we could improve pajama time and those types of things. The survey really opened our eyes into thinking about the holistic experience to satisfaction and not just the EMR experience. That was enlightening. The individual comments were really helpful to understand what themes and where we have the most potential to impact clinician perception. For example, the challenge may be that we haven’t done a great job communicating changes. We have made enhancements, but the perception may be that we are not doing something well. It was helpful to use the data to really understand the pulse of the organization.” —Director of technology adoption and clinical transformation
“Participation in the Arch Collaborative has provided us with a wealth of resources to guide our projects. We are not reinventing any wheels; we just modify them for our needs. We have learned so much from KLAS and the assessment of our results and plans as well as from other Collaborative partners, and we have fostered great relationships and the sharing of projects and plans. I can tell we are making an impact when physician or nurse leaders come to me and ask to participate and want to be in the pilot group. Having a central theme and central focus has been an immense benefit to getting our entire organization behind these efforts. Our Arch Collaborative participation has allowed us to emphasize our needs and gain major investments in people and tools from the senior team and our board to support our EHR usability efforts. We would not have attained this money without the help of data from the KLAS Arch Collaborative.” —CMIO
What Is the KLAS Arch Collaborative?
The Arch Collaborative is a group of healthcare organizations committed to improving the EHR experience through standardized surveys and benchmarking. To date, almost 600,000 healthcare organizations have surveyed their end users and over 380,000 clinicians have responded. Reports such as this one seek to synthesize the feedback from these clinicians into actionable insights that organizations can use to revolutionize patient care by unlocking the potential of the EHR.
The data for this report comes from 16 in-depth interviews with healthcare leaders whose organizations are deeply invested in improving their clinicians’ EHR success and have measured clinician satisfaction with the Arch Collaborative EHR Experience survey.
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Clinician Efficiency and Personalization, Clinician Wellness and Reducing Burnout, Ongoing EHR Education, Peer GuidanceThis material is copyrighted. Any organization gaining unauthorized access to this report will be liable to compensate KLAS for the full retail price. Please see the KLAS DATA USE POLICY for information regarding use of this report. © 2019 KLAS Research, LLC. All Rights Reserved. NOTE: Performance scores may change significantly when including newly interviewed provider organizations, especially when added to a smaller sample size like in emerging markets with a small number of live clients. The findings presented are not meant to be conclusive data for an entire client base.