Training Is Important to Success with Patient Engagement Technology

Recently, we posted an article about a report from Huron Consulting on how digital health is evolving. They looked at priorities and challenges, including some of the key barriers to success. At the end of our review of the data we said we’d do a series of blog posts around this barriers. We’re starting with lack of training.

When I started working in Health IT 25 years ago, I was the marketing copywriter for Medical Manager Health Systems. If you’ve been around as long as me then you’ll know who that is. If not, I’ll sum it up by saying they were one of the largest companies in the space at the time and one of the two most used medical billing technologies. This is only relevant to this article because one of my jobs was to write four or five different monthly and quarterly print newsletters to update our clients on upgrades, new features, best practices, and other news like the passing of HIPAA.

In addition to print newsletters, we had a printing and mailing shop that printed and bound our user manuals and mailed them out. They were like phonebooks. When our teams sold into a system, everything was on-premise and a team of people went in and did training in classrooms with these manuals.

Over the last two decades things have changed a lot. Many solutions are now cloud-based. Training is often online. It is highly unlikely you’ll get a big printed manual via USPS. Companies like Epic that have complex systems conduct training but it is often done as a train-the-trainer program to develop an internal team of informaticists to support the organization.

I am not saying that any one approach is better than another (the research actually bares this out), and I’d be the first person to say that I appreciate any solution that kills fewer trees. However, there is one thing that is constant–there is a direct correlation between the quality of the training and onboarding and overall satisfaction with the technology. There has been substantial research into EHR training and its impact on satisfaction. We can assume the same applies to other healthcare technologies to some degree. Here is what we know:

• The single greatest predictor of user experience is not which EHR a provider uses nor what percent of an organization's operating budget is spent on information technology, but how users rate the quality of the EHR-specific training they received. 
• According to one survey, users experience greater satisfaction with the EHR experience for each additional hour of initial training. 

At the end of the day, no one likes to be in the dark. The more comfortable we are with the technology we need to use, the better we will feel about the experience and the more successful we will be.

To that end, here are a few key questions to ask when vetting new technology solutions:

• What does the onboarding process look like? How long does it take?
• What will we be responsible for? And what is the vendor responsible for?
• How much training and support will we have for the things we need to do?
• What training is available to us? (Online, knowledge base, one-to-one, etc.)
• What ongoing support is available to us? (Phone, email, online, etc.)

There’s no harm in asking to see the knowledgebase or training videos or even the content management system you’ll be using. Most importantly, you need to be well aligned on what the expectations are and how you’ll be supported to ensure your success.