Utilizing Data with the Arch Collaborative – Franciscan Health

With a nursing career that has spanned over three decades (though she doesn’t look it), Tina Patterson, Director of IS Education at Franciscan, has a passion for improving healthcare through education. 

In the early 2000s Franciscan was preparing to make the shift from McKesson to Epic. Tina was working for Franciscan as a clinical educator/patient care coordinator in Cardiac Critical Care. Tina found out she had a knack for EHR education when she accepted a position as the cardiology application educator during the transition. She enjoyed the IS side of education so much she stayed in department and received several more certifications based on department needs.

More recently, after a few years away from Franciscan doing consulting, instructional design, and analyst work, Tina jumped at the opportunity to come back to Franciscan in this education leadership role.

After Angela Langbehn received her Epic certification and worked on the build team for a few years, she transitioned into local informatics with a provider focus, training personalization. Now a Clinical Informaticist at Franciscan, Angela on the informatics team works closely with the training team to work on personalization and a number of other projects including Rover, KLAS, and Nuance.

What goals do you have at Franciscan?

Tina: One of my primary goals from the moment I came back to FA was to elevate the standing of Epic education. Education has kind of been seen as a necessary evil, checking a box, and moving on. We went through a restructure so I could have a much more positive influence over the program. 

We are constantly looking for ways to increase satisfaction, efficiency, and proficiency. A lot of work went in to streamline our training. For long classes we have made them asynchronous to better fit clinician’s schedules. We also pared down the classes to the essential information. It is generally better to give clinicians what they need to hit the ground running and provide more the complex education boost later when they are more ready to learn it. 

I want to make education more readily available. Having a single location where all education lives is a big goal of mine. We built release learning home dashboards in Epic to be a one-stop-shop for all release related training resources. The more application education available at clinicians’ fingertips the better.

Angela: Personally, my goal would be to see more things in informatics work together globally. Even though informatics is under one umbrella, we still tend to think of ourselves very facility based. Informatics standardization is something I want to see grow and evolve.

Additionally, we need to improve our shared governance structure. Right now, governance is essentially facility to facility based. We do have some operation committees that encompass everyone, but we hear rumblings of lack of trust from the staff. Why take the time to do a satisfaction survey if nothing ever comes of it? That is a big hurdle we are working to overcome.

How has the Arch Collaborative helped you in your role?

Tina: I love the Arch Collaborative Learning Center. When I first found out about it, I couldn’t stop digging through all of the information there! With my focus on education I am able to filter the reports and papers down to see things that are super relevant and helpful. 

At one point I was trying to come up with ideas for a nursing refresher training. So, I went on to the Learning Center and I looked up nurse experience scores. I found a particularly good case study that gave me some wonderful design inspiration for the training that I’ve come back to over and over again.

It’s so interesting to see what other organizations have focused on and what analytics they are running and how they managed to solve their problems. I love to take bits and pieces from the different studies to build what our own process is going to look like. 

As a director I also go into the Learning Center and pull articles that I find helpful and will send them to my supervisors so we can review them during our leadership meetings. Especially during the pandemic, we’ve been able to make changes related to our virtual care education based on articles from the Arch Collaborative that really helped in a very hectic time.

Angela: I like that the Arch Collaborative helps us drive our optimizations. We know where we need to spend our information services manpower to fix the things that clinicians feel the strongest about, it’s not just our best guess. 

The Arch Collaborative puts clinicians in the driver seat to be able to get their true feelings. Having KLAS as a third party to allows that anonymity and transparency. It’s so helpful to know how our organization compares to other clinicians EHR satisfaction scores.

On a daily basis I will go in and slice the data from our organizations survey results in different ways. I particularly like to see the scores and split up between the ambulatory and the acute data. I was shocked to see the difference in engagement which gave a lot more clarity to our net satisfaction score. We were able to take meaningful action on out data once we parsed out and drilled down where the real problems were.

I am very data driven, and I think it speaks volumes that our clinicians are willing to take the Arch Collaborative surveys. Going back to that issue of governance, no one would want to participate in a survey that ended up with no actionable results. But with the Arch Collaborative we are able to act on the insights from the data.

What does it mean to you to be a member of the Arch Collaborative?

Tina: The Arch Collaborative is a way to join a community that is willing to share. Especially as I focus on education the Arch Collaborative has obvious benefits for me. 

I’ve followed a lot of internal data before that never changed and never made an impact on my organization. But as a member of the Arch Collaborative I get a lot of really good information that actually increases clinician satisfaction. Changes we have made resulted in an over increase in satisfaction with onboarding education from the 36^th percentile in 2017 to the 95^th percentile in 2020 (FYI, I was able to quickly grab this information directly from the My Data section of the KLAS learning center).

Angela: I like that the Arch Collaborative allows us to participate in a national effort to benchmark the EHR user experience. We can compare our scores with everyone, not just other Epic shops, and that provides a different perspective than we’ve ever had before. 

The information from the Arch Collaborative is just downright interesting. The thought that your specific EHR has less to do with satisfaction than the training, proficiency, and governance do astounds me. And because of our membership, we have been able to act on that data which is what it’s all about.

To find out more about the Arch Collaborative see more on our webpage.

Dive into what the Arch Collaborative Learning Center has to offer in this blog: The Arch Collaborative Learning Center: Knowledge at Your Fingertips

Thank you to Tina, Angela, and Franciscan Health for all you do.