One of the hospital CIOs at The Breakaway Group focus group at the CHIME Fall Forum talked about what he called “Burned IN EHR Workflows.” I thought the concept was really interesting and no doubt something we can all relate with. We all know when the workflows we do are finally burned into our psyche. We often call it our daily routine and we all hate when our routine is disrupted.
As I thought about this idea, I wondered at what point the EHR workflow is finally “burnt in.” There are a lot of factors that go into burning in the EHR workflow. I’d say it rarely happens during EHR training. Although, with the right EHR training it could be the case. The key question is how well your EHR training emulates the actually environment and workflow of the user. Are you just training them on the EHR software or are you training them on the EHR workflow with the new EHR software? I always did the later and found it so much more effective.
As another CIO at CHIME said, “Users don’t want to know the 10 ways to do the same thing. They want to know the single most effective way to do it.” Of course, figuring out the most effective way to do something is the hard part and why so many EHR trainings fall short.
The good thing about burnt in EHR workflows is that if you’ve implemented a great workflow, then it’s great. The problem is that we often burn in sub optimal EHR workflows. I had this happen to me all the time. I’d ask one of my EHR users why they did something a certain way when it would be so much easier to do it another way. It was just the way the EHR workflow was burnt in.
Changing that already burned in EHR workflow is really hard. Although, it’s not impossible and is often necessary. You just have to burn in a new workflow. However, it also often requires an explanation of why the new workflow is better. Good luck changing someone’s workflow when they liked the old workflow. You better have a good reason or they’re unlikely to change.