Recognizing Growth and Impact at the Arch Collaborative Summit

This July, KLAS hosted its seventh Arch Collaborative Learning Summit, an annual event designed for members to collaborate on current problems in the EHR. Over 350 healthcare leaders gathered to share ideas and solutions and to change healthcare for the better. In their opening remarks, KLAS representatives shared a look at the growth and potential of the Arch Collaborative.

Points to Know

• KLAS CEO Adam Gale presented encouraging data to help attendees remember that not only is improvement possible but also high clinician satisfaction is possible. To achieve that aim, Gale issued two challenges to help attendees tip the scales and enact real change.
• VP of Provider Sales Jason Hess gave attendees a look at the growth and improvement of the Arch Collaborative program since its first summit.
• Hess also explained three new frameworks that KLAS is releasing to help providers find and vet outside organizations to help them achieve certain goals.
• VP of Collaborative Insights Jenna Anderson presented real feedback given to KLAS from Arch Collaborative members along with KLAS’ new offerings to address that feedback and better serve healthcare organizations.

A Call to Action

After receiving honest feedback from his children, Gale experienced the frustration that comes from receiving undesirable data even after having implemented changes. Healthcare organizations know that feeling all too well. However, armed with data and insights from Arch Collaborative members, healthcare organizations don’t have to be stuck in frustration and hopelessness. “There are tools that are making people love being a clinician again,” Gale assured.

With that in mind, Gale issued two challenges to the Summit attendees. First, Gale challenged healthcare delivery organizations to not give up and to keep measuring. Receiving negative feedback can feel daunting, especially given all the other priorities that providers balance daily. However, clinician success “raises all of the boats,” Gale says. Happy and healthy providers help their organizations hit all their other metrics much better.

Second, Gale challenged vendor organizations to know the third-party tools that are going to make the biggest difference for clinicians. “Know who they are. Know what works,” Gale encouraged. The vendors who create real partnerships can make a huge difference in healthcare.

An Explosion of Change

Though only having existed since 2017, the Arch Collaborative is making real change. In that time, KLAS has hosted 14 Arch Collaborative events, measured 346 organizations, and gathered over half a million survey responses. And that growth is translating to improved clinician experiences worldwide.

The numbers have never been better. Repeat measurements are scoring an average of 10.6 points higher than first-time measurements. The average net EHR experience scores over time for both nurses and physicians are at all-time highs since the beginning of the Arch Collaborative. And the Arch Collaborative now welcomes 168 members, its highest number ever.

With that growth, some vendors are even sponsoring healthcare organizations wanting to join the Arch Collaborative in an effort to promote honest benchmarking and guide optimization work.

Who Can You Trust?

After receiving Arch Collaborative feedback, many healthcare delivery organizations may recognize the need to bring on external firms to assist them in reaching their goals. KLAS’ new Arch Collaborative frameworks give providers “great tools that [they] can use to learn who else is out there,” Hess says.

Hess presented three of these frameworks at the July Summit, including a framework for EHR education and training, a framework for clinician EHR efficiency, and an upcoming framework for EHR governance to be released this fall. With these frameworks, KLAS hopes to provide healthcare delivery organizations with the tools needed to find trusted partners who can fill organization-specific needs and solve challenges highlighted by Arch Collaborative data.

KLAS Hears You

As a company centered around data gathering, KLAS has not been blind to the data given about its own areas for improvement. “We’ve heard your voice,” Anderson said. Arch Collaborative members have shared needs for simplified data summaries, more detailed how-to guides, prescriptive plans for improvement, strategic partnerships, and a clear ROI from the Arch Collaborative. In response, KLAS is releasing several new features to meet those needs. These include:

• Altering the format of Arch Collaborative case studies to make the data more visually digestible and present more actionable data. These case studies even present information as detailed as how the highlighted organizations were able to achieve organizational buy-in and funding. KLAS is also releasing promotional kits for highlighted organizations to celebrate their improvements internally and publicly.
• Changing the formatting of Arch Collaborative reports. These reports now include how-to guides for improvement. And for leadership groups concerned about the financial aspects of change, Arch Collaborative reports include data about the financials at risk for organizations that don’t institute improvements.
• Providing EHR Experience Executive Scorecards to make data more presentable and digestible. These one-page data sheets show a letter grade for an organization’s standing and include scores for the net EHR experience, education, infrastructure, burnout, and more.
• Releasing Success Pathways with clear steps for improvement, self-examination questions to help clinicians judge their progress, and maturity levels to guide providers to the correct areas of focus. This is to help the Clinicians who have gotten their Arch Collaborative data back and expressed a desire for a playbook of exactly how to improve.
• Instituting quarterly virtual networking sessions to facilitate networking between Arch Collaborative members throughout the year. This change will help foster the spirit of the Arch Collaborative—people in healthcare working together to solve challenges and improve care for patients and providers alike.
• Continuing to support Arch Collaborative members with strategy conversations after data reviews. Arch Collaborative members will get one-on-one guidance from KLAS to create a go-forward plan, put together a timeline for a repeat measurement, have more ongoing conversations, and increase their speed to action.
• Customized surveys on several salient topics, including ambient speech technologies, messaging burden, and virtual learning platforms. Arch Collaborative members can use these surveys or add questions to their existing EHR experience surveys to get a better understanding of these specific topics and their impact.
• Personalized Tech Stack Reports. These reports compare an organization’s scores with their HIT solutions to the scores of other Arch Collaborative members who use those same solutions. These reports cover areas such as inpatient clinical care, ambulatory and post-acute care, value-based care, and others.

And that’s not all that KLAS is changing. In 2025, several new improvements will be released to help Arch Collaborative members continue to improve healthcare. These improvements will focus on helping Arch Collaborative members reach their EHR satisfaction level goals, measuring the impact of third parties, improving surveys, providing ROI measurements, and improving the learning center experience.

At its heart, the Arch Collaborative was designed to unite healthcare organizations, revolutionize healthcare quality, and improve the EHR experience. As Arch Collaborative members continue to share their valuable time, insights, and experiences, change is happening around the world.