The Keys to Successful EHR Education and Training
This is an excerpt from a recent Arch Collaborative webinar featuring Adam Gale, President of KLAS Research and Taylor Davis, VP of Business Development and head of the Arch Collaborative.
Together they discuss what the Arch Collaborative has discovered about the impact of organization culture on clinician satisfaction.
Taylor Davis:
“When we talk about ongoing training, notice that bottom group: Over 5000 respondents in that group who report doing no training. The likelihood of being highly satisfied doubles if you’re doing just 3 to 5 hours of training a year. So we’re recommending on an ongoing basis, if you take half a day, 3 to 5 hours of training, your satisfaction goes up. After that it really doesn’t go up as much, it really levels out.”
Adam Gale:
“Although we’re not suggesting you do this in half-day increments correct?”
Taylor Davis:
“Yeah. There’s actually some ways that we think are sneakier and much more effective ways of training. Now, this number especially is pretty low because we realized, “oh my gosh I think we need to ask this” partway through.
But we asked organizations, “is your ongoing training…” and some of the reason why this is low is that there are a number of organizations that say “We don’t even have an ongoing training program.” So we could have put another bar in here, but we said, “Do you have a proactive training program where you go and grab people and say hey I think that you need some help.” Or is it reactive where you have to raise your hand and say, “hey I think I need some help.”
A lot of the proactive training programs are those where they have somebody who goes and does rounds. And sits over somebody’s shoulder as they’re using the EHR and gives them some feedback. The challenge that we’re seeing there is that it’s pretty expensive to do, and it hits a pretty small percentage of your physicians over time.
So, something that we got really excited about and that we highlighted in the report was that – and I think we’ve highlighted it in our webinars – there is a lot of things that you can do to improve your EHR experience that are not high-cost things to do.
One of those is: Organizations where they always have somebody in the departmental meetings giving a tip or a trick about how to use the EHR better. They tend to see a lot higher satisfaction.”
Adam Gale:
“Right.”
Taylor Davis:
“And this is not really expensive. Mike MacNamara talked in November about how they have physicians who always do this. Their group is in that top bracket. They have physicians who always do this. They’re paid a pretty nominal amount – a couple thousand dollars a year – and their job is to be a communication link back with the organization and to always take 5 minutes in these meetings to step up and say, ‘hey if you ever use chart-review filters, this makes a big difference.’”
Adam Gale:
“Yeah, and by the way, this is one of those happy moments where you see that, “okay, some of the least costly training is some of the most effective.” There’s just a moment where you have to just sit back and smile and say I may not need a hundred people going and doing rounds.
Some of that approach that we’ve been taking that’s more expensive. Look, let’s do it in those departmental meetings where you have an expert training someone that is also in their same specialty.
And I think there’s a more serious moment you take to say, ‘Oh you’re a great physician and you really do that? I’d better jump in and think about that same thing.’”
Taylor Davis:
“We’ve had organizations who’ve jumped in and tried this out, and they’ve said “oh my gosh this made a huge difference for us!”
So this is one that we’re starting to believe has a causal factor with it. And like you say as we move forward with this collaborative hopefully we learn a lot more of these tips and tricks that don’t necessarily require a lot more money.”
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