The following Q&A with Dr. Brian Patty, our Chief Medical Informatics Officer and former hospital CMIO and emergency physician, is based on questions we received during our presentation, “The EHR Cause and Effect: How Today’s Implementation Makes or Breaks Tomorrow’s Success,” which you can watch via our on-demand Digital Healthcare Technology Virtual Summit.
What is Medix Technology’s advice for helping ensure our clinicians are satisfied with our new Epic EHR? The last thing we want is for it to contribute to burnout, or even turnover.
Dr. Patty:
Great question. There are three major ingredients: governance, personalization, and training.
When establishing your governance team, always make sure that clinicians have a seat at the table. When their voice is heard, and they’re allowed to represent their peers, it’s easier to get full buy-in.
As far as personalization, I recommend starting with specialty-level personalizations—user settings—developed with help from key physicians in each specialty and applied to all physicians within that specialty. Then, fine tune those personalizations with 1:1 sessions with physicians.
And for training, know that it never stops. Yes, most of it will happen during the early, onboarding stages, but it’s ongoing. Research shows that end users need an additional 3-4 hours of training per year. Not to mention, they need ongoing support to answer their questions, field their suggestions, and more. Make sure you retain the training staff needed to meet these needs.
Speaking of governance, how do you help your clients set up a governance team? We’re not sure where to start.
Dr. Patty:
In short, we consult, using our extensive knowledge and experience to help healthcare organizations build effective governance teams—teams that clearly communicate and understand their responsibilities.
We almost always recommend a top-down approach to set up your governance, but a bottom up approach to decision-making. Set up your executive steering committee first, followed by mid-level advisory committees based on recommendations from the executive committee, and finally the end-user workgroups, again, based on the recommendations from the advisory committees. Because only 10% of decisions, mostly around budget, scope, and timing, are made by the executive steering committee. Roughly 25% are made by your various advisory committees. And up to 65% are made by your end-user workgroups, who clearly have the most experience actually using an EHR on a daily basis. If you set up your governance using this strategy, it ensures that the people on the advisory committees and workgroups are allotted the time they need to serve on those committees, because their bosses put them there!
After helping with dozens of implementations—and thanks to having a staff partly made up of former Epic employees—we have been able to develop proven governance structures, which we help clients customize based on a number of factors.
What are your Epic EHR implementation staffing solutions? We want some external help to find the staff we need.
Dr. Patty:
Because it’s so difficult to find Epic-certified talent, it’s almost always necessary to outsource some of the staffing. We offer two innovative solutions: MedixDirect and MedixFlex.
With MedixDirect, we build new talent pools by identifying non-Epic certified talent from your local market with a strong likelihood to succeed on an Epic project. We pay to have them certified, and place them at your organization at a fraction of the cost of traditional consultants. At the end of the project, if you have a need and they are a good fit, you can convert them to your employees at no conversion cost.
And then with MedixFlex, you can essentially subscribe to Epic-certified talent when you need it, based on project demand, at any stage of your implementation and beyond. This allows you to “flex” up and down as your needs arise.
Both of our solutions are designed to deliver the best talent in the most cost-effective and flexible way—enabling your organization to experience success, and to do it within budget.
Get the consultative and cost-effective Epic support your organization needs to improve clinical performance and satisfaction. Contact our experts today.