It’s rare to find a clinician who raves about their organization’s electronic health record. Nearly every provider needs an EHR, but few are satisfied with their system — often due to its difficulty of use, excessive or irrelevant alerts, and downtime.
A new report from KLAS broke down some of the key factors that influence clinicians’ perceptions of their EHR. Below are three questions EHR vendors can ask themselves to improve providers’ experiences with their systems, based on the report’s findings.
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Is our system easy to learn?
For this report, KLAS used survey responses from more than 370,000 clinicians across 300 healthcare organizations. Just 2% of healthcare organizations included in the survey had at least 81% of their clinicians agree that their EHR is easy to learn.
If an EHR vendor does not invest in its training processes, some clinicians will feel like the EHR is impossible to learn, the report pointed out. A key way that vendors can improve clinicians’ EHR education process is by providing workflow-specific training.
Another way is to focus the training on what EHR use would look like during patient care interactions. For example, Franciscan Health provided its clinicians with scenario-based trainings that taught them the best way to use the EHR for their patients instead of teaching them different ways to complete the same function, the report said.
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Is our system reliable?
EHR vendors must remember that reliability is about more than just downtime. If a clinician has any difficulty accessing or using the EHR, it will contribute to their dissatisfaction with the system — even if the issue is rooted in their organization’s connectivity issues or other software or hardware.
Vendors should also prioritize their system’s response time, as a slow response time can make clinicians feel like their EHR is unreliable and unable to serve their needs during patient visits.
To prevent downtime and other issues affecting clinicians’ ability to access and use the EHR, vendors should clearly communicate best practices that healthcare organizations should follow when setting up the EHR, the report recommended. Vendors should also be frank about which technology is most compatible with their system, such as single sign-on options, other software products, hardware and internet providers.
Do alerts benefit our customers or contribute to their burnout?
EHR alerts are a tricky topic amongst clinicians, according to the report. When implemented well, alerts can help prevent care delivery mistakes. But when alerts are implemented poorly, they can overwhelm and annoy clinicians.
A key mistake that EHR vendors should avoid is assuming that their customers are utilizing alerts in the most effective manner. Instead, vendors should work with their customers to find a strategy for alerts that helps clinicians evade alert fatigue.
Photo: invincible_bulldog, Getty Images
