Balancing EHR Change vs Train

I was talking with Heather Haugen from The Breakaway Group (A Xerox company) today and in our discussion she used the word “train”, but I heard the word “change”. I always love a good play on words and so it was interesting for me to consider the difference between change and train in an EHR implementation.

Every EHR implementation I’ve been apart of walks a fine line between users wanting the EHR software to change versus the need for an EHR user to change. One of the most common phrases out of a doctor’s mouth during an EHR implementation is, “Why did the EHR vendor implement that feature like this? Did they not talk to a doctor? This makes no sense.” We’ve dug in previously to the concept of EHR vendors consulting doctors during their EHR development so we won’t go into that further now. Every EHR vendor consults doctors, but no two doctors practice alike. So, it’s normal that every doctor would wonder why certain features are implemented the way they are implemented.

When faced with this issue, the doctor is faced with an important decision with two options. The first option is to work with the EHR vendor and convince them to change how their EHR works. In a large hospital EHR vendor situation, this can be almost impossible. Plus, even if that EHR vendor does like your suggested change it’s going to take months and sometimes years before that change is implemented in the EHR software, tested, and released all the way to you the end user. Yes, these changes can go faster with a SaaS EHR, but it still will likely take months before the change reaches the end user.

In some cases, you can wait for the change to be made before using that EHR feature. However, more often than not a doctor is going to have to train on how the EHR vendor has implemented the feature. This highlights to me why having great EHR training is so important. Sure, many of the things in an EHR will be intuitive, but great EHR training is still always beneficial. EHR software is too complex to just pickup and use. Plus, even if you can use the basic EHR features, good training points out the ways to optimize the EHR workflow.

Most doctors don’t understand why various parts of an EHR workflow can’t be easily changed. They just think change should happen easily. Ironically, the doctor then proceeds to resist any change to how they want to work.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

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