Vendor Support in the Arch Collaborative

The greatest opportunity of the Arch Collaborative is to improve the EHR experience. To effectively do this, there must be collaboration between all parties involved. We believe this includes the health systems who measure their clinicians’ EHR satisfaction and the vendors who implement, build, integrate, support, and optimize the platforms.

The Arch Collaborative will always be a provider-driven effort. Inviting vendors to participate and learn is not taking away from that focus, rather it is putting the final piece in place for organizations to continue to improve the EHR experience on every front. Collaborative data allows EHR companies and firms to align their offerings with clinicians’ needs and focus their efforts where they will have the most impact.

Why Vendors Support the Collaborative

Many vendors and firms who are already involved readily understand and believe Arch Collaborative findings, specifically the three pillars that make a satisfied EHR user. Why? The pillars often support what these vendors are already communicating to their customers.

Collaborative data, collected from over 250,000 clinical respondents, is the third-party voice vendors need to support certain implementation or improvement recommendations. Being able to show that they have data from an unbiased source, and one that comes from their customers’ peers, can go a long way in strengthening client-vendor relationships. It is one more voice reiterating the importance of initial and ongoing training, meeting unique user needs, and having a culture of shared ownership.

In cases where a vendor’s offering doesn't follow the three pillars or other best practices, Collaborative involvement is a huge opportunity for vendors to make changes from real data – from real people with real success stories. We encourage vendors to consume our data with the goal to improve their products and services.

Measuring and Improving Together

KLAS and the Arch Collaborative team are helping facilitate collaboration between health systems and vendors by creating an avenue for health systems to share their Arch Collaborative results with their vendor partners. The decision to share or not resides 100% with the health system. But most decide to share because vendor involvement presents a huge opportunity, and health systems don’t need to tackle these challenges on their own.

When a health organization does agree to share their data, their vendors can use the Collaborative as a measuring stick of the work they're doing. Many health systems and vendors partner together to run pre/post surveys to measure effectiveness. Are the new training tips and tricks making a difference? Are clinicians more efficient after an optimization project and thus more satisfied? Just as health organizations are already doing with their data to make changes internally, vendors can know the real impact their efforts are making for their customers.

Collaborative results can also be used as a refocusing tool. Healthcare organizations sometimes tell us they were working on one thing, and then they get their survey results, and they realize they need to change their focus. The same can be true for vendors. It's a great way to make sure everyone is working on the projects that will have the greatest impact.

A Commitment to Improvement

The focus of a vendor membership is definitely not the potential marketing opportunity, though that could be a piece. Rather, vendors who are participating show a commitment to real improvement for their customers. And that takes effort—a vendor recently said they didn't expect their Collaborative membership to be so much work. At the outset, some vendors think participation is purely from an educational standpoint. Participation does grant vendors access to our learnings, but we’re also working to take that education one step further to help vendors put the data into action.

In the end, vendor members who work more closely with their customers will get the most value out of the Collaborative. Our goal is to create a common language where both health organizations and vendors can get on and stay on the same page of what needs to happen to take their EHR experience to the next level.

You can learn more about each of the participating vendors by going to their new Vendor Community pages. Here you’ll find information about each vendor’s EHR-related offerings, and why they joined the Collaborative.