The Training Room: Challenges in Physician Adoption
By Linda Franks

The Electronic Medical Record (EMR) is always a work in progress, with updates and new functionality frequently added. The EMR is the central patient record. It is accessed by caregivers from every department and unit in the hospital, which makes frequent, incremental changes a distraction and a frustration for the end user. In addition, the Education Department in the hospital has the enormous task of keeping everyone well trained on all the new enhancements. In an academic setting, where one third of the Residents are new every year, the education of all caregivers on the EMR becomes a daunting task. Physicians and nursing staff can quickly become negative about the software and the IT department supporting it if they are not properly trained.

Some common hurdles in training are:

• Difficulties in getting clinical workers scheduled for classes
• Constantly changing EMR
• Turnover of nurses and physicians in an academic hospital
• EMR changes may not be intuitive
• Steep learning curve for some nurses and physicians
• Resistance to formal training by physicians
• Resistance to change by everyone

One solution that can facilitate education is the creation of “The Training Room.” At a large teaching hospital in the mid-west the Chief of Staff in coordination with VCS established a training room with tremendous success.

Staffed by educators and IT support, the training room was established with the goal of providing EMR users easy access to education. It was strategically located across the hall from the physician’s lounge and open between 8:00am and 5:00pm every day of the week. “The” training room was really two rooms. One room was designed with a small conference table and large screen monitor mounted on the wall, as well as three computer workstations for small group instruction. The other room had four workstations for end users and one for the IT staffer who was available all day to address any technical issues with the equipment or the software. The small, but experienced teaching staff provides one-on-one training for every clinical and non-clinical software system in the hospital. They created training manuals to be used as reference material and had these materials updated and approved by subject matter experts on a continuous basis.

The physicians, technicians, nurses and other system user’s just drop-in any time and can stay as long as they want. The training staff keeps a log of those that use the training room and what they are being trained on. This information is provided to the appropriate teams to help them to improve their approach to large scale training. While online tutorials, captivate modules, and other forms of education tools are available online, some of the end users simply stop by the training room to get instruction on how to access these online tools or to resolve technical issues with these learning tools.

The Training Room, known by users as the room number it occupies 1W-36, has become a great success story. It has become a model for the overall training strategy which is being further developed as additional hospitals and other healthcare facilities are added to the Healthcare System. For more information about how VCS can help you set up a training room please call us at (610)444.1233 or email us at vcs@getvitalized.com. You can learn more about VCS by visiting our website at www.getvitalized.com.