Low EHR satisfaction scores have a direct correlation with clinician burnout, but health systems are finding new ways to move the needle and improve satisfaction with a focus on EHR education.
Tune into this Becker’s Healthcare podcast, featuring Connor Bice, product owner of KLAS Research Arch Collaborative and Liz Griffith, director of EHR education at uPerform and former director of customer insights at KLAS. The two share their passion for, and experience, working with leading health systems to measure EHR satisfaction and developing strategies for improving it.
Low EHR satisfaction scores have a direct correlation with clinician burnout, but health systems are finding new ways to move the needle and improve satisfaction with a focus on EHR education.
Tune into this Becker’s Healthcare podcast, featuring Connor Bice, product owner of KLAS Research Arch Collaborative and Liz Griffith, director of EHR education at uPerform and former director of customer insights at KLAS. The two share their passion for, and experience, working with leading health systems to measure EHR satisfaction and developing strategies for improving it.
JACOB: Hello everyone. My name is Jacob Emerson. I'm a reporter and editor with Becker's Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning into our Becker's Healthcare podcast series as we discuss EHR satisfaction, clinician burnout, and much more. We're thrilled today to be joined by two amazing guests. Conor Bice is the product owner of the Arch Collaborative and has been a part of the KLAS team for over five years now.
During this time, he's helped develop the benchmark survey, written dozens of case studies and reports and lead KLAS’ national and international events. Liz Griffith is the director of EHR education at uPerform. She was previously also with KLAS Research Arch Collaborative, and on the forefront she works directly with leading health systems to understand where their EHR satisfaction currently is and understand how they can work to improve it.
Connor and Liz, thank you so much for joining us here today.
CONNOR: Thank you for having us. We're excited.
LIZ: Yes.
JACOB: Well with that, let's jump right into our conversation today. Connor, why exactly is EHR satisfaction such an important topic, and why do you think that health systems should be making this a strategic priority?
CONNOR: Yeah, it's a great question. I was talking with a cardiologist recently. We were talking about his EHR, and he was talking about how he had this provider note. And it disappeared, and now all of his provider notes are intermixed with all clinical notes and how big of a frustration that was in his daily life, because instead of being able to see his peers notes, he had to go and see every glucose test that wasn't relevant to his patient. And so that was a major dissatisfier of his day to day life. And so things like that, we don’t often think about as challenges when we’re thinking of EHR satisfaction. Oh, it’s just a note. It’s something they have to deal with every day. All clinicians have to type in notes. But this small change – he didn’t understand the reason behind it. He didn’t understand why it took place, and he didn’t understand why it made his life so much harder. And so things like that are impacting our clinicians every day. And what we are hoping to do with this podcast, and with uPerform, and with the Arch Collaborative is to help raise awareness and help organizations understand that EHR satisfaction should be a strategic priority for them.
LIZ: You know, honestly, I really love this topic, as well. I’m the person that will bore anyone at a dinner party, because I will start talking about EHR satisfaction to people who have no idea what it is. Similar to Connor, I love the opportunity to talk individually with our clinicians, whether that’s a nurse when I take my kid into our InstaCare clinic, whether it’s my primary care physician. I’m always asking them, ‘Hey, how’s your experience with your EHR?’ And typically the response is a pretty general eye roll of like ugh. And working in this since, you know – we started this about 2017, 2018. And having read thousands and thousands of these comments from clinicians, you know, Connor kind of hit the nail on the head. They don’t always understand why changes are being made to them without their input. They’re forced to use this very, very complex technology, and that technology has an impact on how they deliver patient care, and it has an impact on their everyday. I’ll give you a really brief example. Just the other day, my Outlook made an update to where instead of having my icons at the bottom of my screen, they’re now on the left hand, and I was frustrated for a solid day. Like all day. I was like, ‘This is just – ugh – like my muscle memory, and now I have to go to a different part of the screen to toggle back and forth between my mail and my calendar.’ Now imagine that in one of the most complex software systems ever developed, and people who might show up to work one day and all of a sudden their entire screen has changed and no one warned them about it. And it totally impacts how they’re interacting with their patients. And we would read over and over, ‘I feel like I’m babysitting a computer, and I don’t even look at my patients in the face anymore. I don’t get to look at them, make eye contact, and really connect with them, because I’m so busy over here trying to figure out what to do in the computer.’ That’s a true frustration for people who really believed that they wanted to come into healthcare to help people and to help patients and this feeling oftentimes – not everywhere – but often times is ‘I just now feel like I babysit a computer. I’m just a data entry clerk, and I really wanted to be a physician or a nurse.’
CONNOR: Exactly, Liz. These clinicians didn’t go into healthcare to work with computers. They went into healthcare to treat patients and deliver quality patient care. And I just want to point out some data here. We’re sharing these examples, and they sound like one-off examples, but in the Arch Collaborative what we see is that 75% of organizations will have a physician in the same specialty using the same EHR, where one will say ‘I strongly disagree that the EHR has the functionality needed for my specialty,’ and the other will strongly agree. And so, the technology is the exact same, but the way that they are taught, the way that they understand why changes are made, the way that they use the EHR is completely different. And so, what makes that difference? We will see organizations using a software scoring, you know, 70% of their clinicians agree that the system is efficient. And then same software, 10% will agree. And so, what makes the difference in that variation are things that we’ve seen over and over again. It’s how well they’ve been trained to use the system. How well the system is governed. How well are changes communicated? How well are changes made? How well is feedback taken into consideration? Do the clinicians trust their IT leadership to build a quality EHR? And then how well do they personalize the system? Not change the code of the system itself, but those small tweaks to change the layout of your screen or to access the data that you need to set up those filters or to put in a macro that can quickly type out a note that is a standard not that you’re writing. So, those three things are really key. In fact, we see that 31% of satisfaction with their EHR can be attributed to their agreement of how well they’ve been trained. It’s pretty stark – those who have been trained and those who haven’t – how diverse their EHR satisfaction can be.
LIZ: Yeah. And I want to tag onto what Connor’s talking about right there in that variation, in that diversity. Prior to the pandemic, when I would work with my clients and work with these health systems, one of the number one conversations we always had was, ‘well we offer training, but we can’t get people into the classroom.’ And so, I was constantly just talking to my clinicians. How do we get clinicians into the classroom? And then we all know in 2020, the world changed. I could no longer say, ‘how are we getting clinicians into the classroom?’ to a leadership team who was talking to me about major nursing shortages. And we can no longer put more than six people in the size classroom we have, but we have 150 nurses to onboard this week alone. We can’t put them in a classroom. So, there were very dramatic changes that happened very, very quickly and organizations were kind of forced into – we’ll call it virtual training. They were. They were forced to take what was previously done in a classroom and figure out a way to do that without a physical classroom and without bringing people together. And it was funny, I was going to say, it’s kind of like this old adage, but it’s really not that old, because technology isn’t that old. But… People, process, and technology. Are you making decisions? First, you’ve got to put the people first.How do we still make sure and ensure that our clinicians have the tools that they need to be successful? What are the processes we have in place? And now do we have the technology to support that? Some of those first organizations that were trying to make those changes were saying things like, ‘Well, we set up a Teams channel, and we had to shift to use Google Classroom.’ We had to make these transitions as quickly as possible. And now that we’re a few years into this, and we’re really saying, there are really successful ways that we can support these transitions. Not only at the people and process level, but there’s really some great technology out there as well.
JACOB: It’s really interesting to hear a lot of those stark statistics and anecdotal evidence of what is happening with clinician burnout on the ground. In regards to clinician burnout, we know this is a multifaceted issue. There isn’t necessarily one solution here, but there is a lot of data that’s pointing to the fact that the EHR is a big part of the problem. How do you both think that EHR satisfaction plays into the current clinician burnout crisis we’re seeing?
CONNOR: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. Burnout is a multifaceted issue. And the example that I provided earlier – the cardiologist talking about how his life has become more difficult because the provider note is now intermixed with all the rest of the clinical notes is one example. But what we are seeing is there is a relationship between the EHR satisfaction and between a clinician’s perception of – or their own self rating of – burnout. And what we’re seeing is there are ways to make a positive impact. There are things that organizations can do to make a positive impact on that. And one of those things is being trained specifically on workflow education. I think for so long the EHR has been such a complicated technology that many organizations have been training on the functionality of the tool itself and less on ‘this is how you do your job to treat patients, and this is how you use the EHR to support you in that endeavor.’ And I think organizations are now starting to make that switch. The organizations we’re talking to in the collaborative are saying we’re doing much more scenario-based training. It’s much more tailored to the specialty. It’s much more specific to what the physician and the nurse need when they start their…it’s less ‘Click this button, click this button, then click this button.’ It’s more ‘This is how you do your job and this is how the EHR can support you.’ So we’re seeing some pretty strong data that when you have been trained specifically on how to complete your workflows in the EHR, that those that strongly agree to that question have significantly lower levels of burnout than those that strongly disagree.
LIZ: Absolutely. And I love that you shared that, Connor. It’s been really fun to partner together now, you know, formally being as part of the Arch Collaborative and now being part of this awesome uPerform team. This understanding is very, very important to the work that we do, because as an organization, we are asking ‘How does our technology help support this very specific workflow training?’
And so, if there's any way where we can say, ‘Hey, how do we just reduce that burden on our clinicians?’ Like you said, as a multifaceted issue, improving EHR satisfaction or improving training isn't the only thing that's going to make a difference. But should we not do it because it can't fix the whole problem? No, absolutely not. We should take ever step possible that we can to combat and support our clinicians. You know, in a world where we see very significant staffing shortages, we’re seeing nursing strikes happen across the country in very large numbers. Covid is still a thing. I know sometimes we don’t want to believe it is, but we’re still seeing these spikes. The question we have to ask ourselves are ‘What is within our power to support our clinicians? And one of those ways – and the KLAS data continues to show over and over the importance of training – is how can we actually now shift from what I was talking about previously, saying, ‘Hey, how do we get people into classrooms?’ to ‘How do we get training into the hands of our clinicians at the time they need it?’ Because we still find over and over that one of the number one ways people get help when they need it is to tap a friend on the shoulder, right? So, I’m going to go – if I’m a clinician, I’m going to go find my fellow clinician, say ‘Hey, how did you get through this?’ or ‘How do I do that?’ or ‘I’m going to hand it off to my nurses.’ If I’m a nurse, I’m just tapping another nurse. I’m pulling her away from the bedside, him or her from the bedside, to say ‘Hey, can you help me on this?’ If we can find a way, and as an organization, our technology is geared towards putting that training directly at the fingertips of the clinician so that while I’m in my EHR, I can access that training. I don’t have to go log out and search a different system. It’s that ability to bring the training right to our clinicians when they need it. And I think – and I love that this specific part about workflow-specific – that the more we can tailor it directly to the needs of that clinician, the better they are. One of the things that, you know – as I would work with organizations and read comments, a lot of the comments were, ‘Yeah, I attended that initial training class. But all of the screen shares they used were from a provider’s perspective. And I’m a nurse and my screen doesn’t look anything like that. So when I got on the floor, it was like, I really hadn’t even attended training or this trainer didn’t know how to talk to me about my specialty. They couldn’t answer my specific questions. So while I know how to login and I know how to do the basics, I really need someone who can help me understand how to make this useful for my specialty.’ Which is what Connor was talking about earlier from that perspective of really personalizing and optimizing the EHR to me as a clinician so that it fits me. And it’s not a one size fits no one tee shirt.
JACOB: I see. So obviously the need for growing clinician EHR workflow training is key here. So, let’s talk about how that’s transpiring as of late. My understanding is that KLAS has been running this research on this topic since 2017. So, how have you all seen health systems improve the clinician’s experience with their EHR, and what are some of the trends you’ve been seeing around this topic over the years?
CONNOR: Yeah, we’ve been doing this since 2017, and when we first started this, we didn’t know – we actually had a goal. We’re like – it was a very optimistic goal – we want to be so good at this that in three years clinicians won’t need to worry about EHR satisfaction anymore, that the problem will be solved. And we were a bit optimistic with that, but what we have seen is that organizations have been improving their satisfaction over time. There are rumors and theories and things that organizations are doing that they’re trying to make this better. And the most common way that we are seeing improvement being made is through additional training. Most organizations that have significant bumps have significantly revamped their training. They’ve offered it to more people. They’ve adjusted their content so that it is more specific. They’ve made sure that their trainers are using relevant clinical examples. There was a nurse I was talking to that was saying, ‘Hey, you know, the trainer was great, but they said that this shot was supposed to be given in the deltoid, and it’s a subdermal injection that we’re supposed to do, and it just made me lose confidence, a little bit of confidence in that trainer because the clinical examples that they were giving weren’t actually true.’ And so things like that are making a difference. But organizations are really improving by significantly revamping and spending significant time in adjusting and rebuilding their training content to make sure that’s relevant. Organizations are seeing some small improvements by implementing some types of technologies. We’ve seen some speech recognition satisfaction where people are anecdotally more happy with the system, because they are able to use that technology. We’ve seen great companies like uPerform come in and offer just-in-time training where they’re able to access it and not have to take time away from their schedules to come in and, ‘I need help right now. I just need to know how to do this thing, and I can’t remember it.’ So, having that just-in-time training has been helpful. And then the third way that organizations are really improving is adjusting, improving their trust in IT, adjusting their governance in ways, giving clinicians a voice to have feedback in the EHR. When you feel like you are involved in making this better and you have a voice and your ideas are being heard, it helps you feel more ownership of the system. It helps you feel kind of proud that you’ve made a positive impact for you and your peers and so giving clinicians a voice to do that has been a great way to improve satisfaction as well.
LIZ: Yeah, absolutely. It’s been a lot of fun, and I remember those days too, Connor, as it’s kind of our mantra. Like, we want to put ourselves out of business. We want everyone to be so happy. And yeah, I think we were maybe a little bit naïve, but the truth is, we’ve actually seen really significant improvements for both individual organizations and then as a whole as an industry. Those organizations who are taking the time to measure are improving. I think one of my favorite moments from this last year was getting to attend the KLAS Arch Collaborative Conference as a uPerform employee. Coming in and seeing and working with some of my clients. But Connor got up on stage, and he said the key takeaway – if you take nothing else away from this summit, you need to take away that – don’t stop. Because it’s working. We’re seeing satisfaction improve as a whole. You’re seeing it as individual organizations, and we’re seeing it across the board. There are over 200 organizations who have measured their EHR satisfaction. There are hundreds of thousands of responses to this survey. This is not a small benchmark. Those organizations taking the time and then being able to see kind of these pre and posts or be able to slice and dice their data and say, ‘Who is really seeing improvements?’ And I’m going to shine a spotlight here for a minute, but we partnered together, KLAS and uPerform and Baylor Scott & White [Health]. They were participating in the measurement and they wanted to look and see are those users how are getting this at the time of need training – are they more satisfied? And, as a whole, yes they were. They were over 12 points more satisfied on a negative 100 to positive 100 scale. This was a statistically significant improvement in overall satisfaction between their users who utilize this at the time of need uPerform platform training versus those who are not utilizing that training.
And it just speaks volumes to this ability to access what I need in the moment I need it. You know, something else that we saw recently…We were able to host an in-person uPerform event. It was fantastic. We had, I believe, six different client organizations come and share one of the key themes, and so this goes back to people, process, and technology right?
In that order, one of the key themes that we saw from all of these organizations sharing successes was this filling of empowering their end users. It wasn’t just about, ‘Hey, we need them to be more trained on the EHR.’ It was, ‘We, as an organization, need to empower them to be able to feel very efficient and proficient with the technologies that they use today.’ They’re using the training to not only train on the EHR, but other modules and areas our clinicians have to interact with technology. I don’t know if anyone’s been to the hospital lately, but there is a lot of technology going on in there, and the more that we can empower our clinicians to feel like they know where to go, who to see, how to get the help that they need; the more that they feel like they can then spend more time delivering great patient care.
JACOB: It’s really great to hear that overall EHR satisfaction is improving. A lot of great inroads being made there, but it sounds like it’s taken a lot of work, time, resources to get to this point. So when we think about a post Covid world, you both have made clear that virtual training is not going away. So what shifts in the industry does KLAS foresee? And what are some of the ways that health systems are finding success with virtual training and also with uPerform specifically?
LIZ: Oh, that’s a great question. I’m going to jump right in here, because this is something I feel really, really passionate about. Joining the uPerform team for me was a huge – was kind of just a next step in building on what I’d already spent several years working towards and helping organizations understand. When we talk about a shift into virtual training, this is not as simple as taking a teacher who – a trainer – who knows how to stand in front of a classroom and teach for eight hours and just translating that into a platform, right? There’s really a framework that has to exist in order for organizations to see success in this transition. As an organization, we talk about this from the perspective of, kind of, four key areas. You have to really have a great strategy that encompasses content creation. You can’t create content the same for a virtual training platform as you do for in classroom. Content management. There is so much content to be made. One of my favorite quotes…I’ll go back to Baylor Scott & White. When Georgianna came and presented at the KLASS Arch [Collaborative] Summit, she said ‘One of our problems is we now are creating too much content. It’s just almost too easy.’ If we have great content creation, now we have to manage all that content that we create. EHRs, specifically, are constantly being updated. Sometimes quarterly, at least annually. Major, major changes to the technology comes out, and then all that content needs to be managed and updated and kept current. You need to really think about the delivery. Content delivery is where that just-in-time training, that ability to insert your training directly into the clinician's flow of work, directly into the EHR really, really makes a difference. Because as a clinician, if I can just find that right when I'm working within my workflow and that training's been built out specifically for my specialty or my area of focus, that's really empowering. And then on the tail end, we need the analytics and the reporting. This is where, as an organization, I need to know what's working. I need to know where are people accessing that training from, how frequently, which of my documents are being utilized more, which ones are being shared, so that then that gives feedback, not just to my training team, but then back to my clinicians. And I can work with them and say, ‘Hey, maybe you haven't accessed this.’ Maybe they're not aware. So, it gives us more opportunity. And then as part of that, that's going to have an impact on both how as an organization you strategize around your initial and onboarding training. So, whether that's onboarding new employees or even initial training on a new technology. And then it's also going to impact how you look at your ongoing training, because now instead of having a trainer who stands in front of a classroom for eight hours, I can repurpose that trainer into a coach. And this is something that we saw recently that Gundersen Health did. They implemented what they call EnlightenMe labs, where people can come and do a much more condensed, shorter kind of virtual lab on a computer training. But that has opened up those trainers who used to have to teach for hours at a time to be one-on-one coaches. So I can finish my two to three hour initial training online course and then sign up immediately to get that next level one-on-one training where I can say, ‘Hey, here’s how I really need it personalized for my usage. Those are just a few examples of what we’re seeing on our side with organizations who have made some really, really successful transitions.
CONNOR: Yeah. And we get asked all the time, ‘What type of training is the best type of training?’ And our answer is training. Some training is better than nothing. If you’re doing anything, you’re likely going to be having a positive impact. There are some key things that we need to know. People are people and they learn in different ways, right? And so for some, a virtual training where they don’t have to interact with anyone is enough. And for others, that’s just frustrating, because it doesn’t have the specific content that they are looking for. And so we like to talk about it as arrows in the quiver. Some need at-the-elbow, some need just-in-time, virtual training. Some need a virtual classroom. Some need in-person classroom. As an organization, it’s your responsibility to meet the clinicians where they are at and provide the training that they need. But I do love Liz’s point about coaching. We have several organizations. We have even changed the terminology, because sometimes they’re like, ‘I’m a physician, not a dog. I don’t need to be trained. I need to be coached. I need to be taught.’ And so several organizations have made that terminology change. But the concept of…’You are a professional. You a professional athlete, and you still have a coach, and you’re still working to improve your craft’ has really resonated with a lot of organizations. So taking the time that maybe would’ve been spent in, ‘Okay this is the button you click and this is the next step, and this is the next step.’ And taking that time and maybe making that a video, so that people can watch that before they come. But then really bringing in coaches to say, ‘Okay, I’ve watched you work. I’ve seen some of the inefficiencies that you’ve adopted. Things have changed, things have been updated. Things are different than how you were trained initially. And here’s some things that you can do now to be more efficient in your use of the EHR. Here’s some things that will make your life easier here. I’m going to take 10 clicks away by showing you how to put this filter in place, so it runs every time.’ Those types of activities are really important. Virtual training’s not going away. It’s a great arrow in the quiver. It’s something the organizations can definitely take advantage of. I will raise one point of caution though. If that is the only thing that you are offering, you are likely missing out on a target audience who would benefit from a different type of training, as well. So, just keep that in mind. Use it as an arrow in the quiver. It’s definitely valuable, but make sure it’s not the only thing that you’re offering.
LIZ: We agree with that as well. I think that – and we often use the term ‘a hybrid approach,’ right? A comprehensive learning ecosystem is the term we really like to use. And we actually had a lot of conversations around that as well at our user summit, Connor, that this term training is probably antiquated in and of itself. That we need to start even by shifting – language drives a lot of how we even think about things, right? And from a strategic standpoint, when we start using the word education or learning rather than training, now we’re expecting that clinician to be an active participant. You’re no longer just a warm body sitting in a room. It’s, ‘Hey, my job is to support these folks who are now delivering great patient care.’ And an interesting point that I wanted to make, as well. You know Dr. Linn, who’s been on the Becker’s Podcast before and is very well known throughout the industry, helped introduce ambulatory sprints. And this is now something that the KLAS Arch Collaborative is also measuring really well and has seen a lot of success. They’ve got specific reports about how to be successful in an ambulatory spring and even in that research that he’s done in his own organization and that KLAS has seen as well, it comes back to 80%. The success that you’re going to see is coming down to working individually with the people, and only about 20 percent’s going to come down to technology. So when we talk about making a shift to virtual training, it is not as simple as plugging in a technology. You have to have a great strategy around that. And then you have to know how to measure and then how to work with people. One conversation that’s happening in healthcare today that I really, really love, and I think applies to EHR satisfaction – I think it applies to making transitions and how we talk about training – is this talk about consumer healthcare. This is the conversation being had I think all over the place right now. How do we start treating patients more as consumers and empowering them? I would argue that we need to treat our clinicians within our own system as consumers. And Dr. Lin talked about this as well, and it was one of my favorite things that he said. He said, we’ve got to start thinking. We’ve got to kind of, like, wipe this slate clean and say, ‘If we could build this new, using what exists today and the technology that exists today and the processes, how, what would we change?’ And if you’ve ever met Dr. Lin, he places the ukulele, and he loves music, and he loves making things really fun. And he talked about the use of TikTok. Well, if you understand the concept behind what’s going on in social media today and TikToks and Reels, it’s all about this 45-second world, the 90-second world. If you can get someone’s attention for 45 to 90 seconds, you’re more likely to be able to engage that person. M Health Fairview saw a really successful outcome using the same methodology. We call them microlearnings, when you can insert a very small video clip or a very small – whatever, whether it’s a small tip sheet – but really only trying to focus on one thing. So, they were looking at their utilization of their e-consent tool. They had only about a 7% adoption rate of this e-consent tool. They were able to insert a micro-learning directly into the e-consent navigator, and just by making that one shift in how they approached the learning for this, they went from a 7% adoption to an 87% adoption. That’s an 80% increase by looking at their learners the same way that a social media influencer looks at their audience and says, ‘How do I get their attention for just a minute?’ And so if we start taking all of these other tricks of the trade from other industries and apply them to increasing the knowledge of our clinicians, I think there’s a lot to be learned.
JACOB: That is just so interesting. And who would’ve thought that TikTok, of all places, would’ve had some of the answers here for this issue? I mean, and to your point Liz, you talked about how a lot of these EHR updates are coming quarterly. So it really puts into context just how many changes are occurring, how much you have to stay on top of. And Connor, to your point, why training in general is just so important to have. Now I want to switch topics a bit. uPerform, you partnered with the KLAS Arch Collaborative to understand, to evangelize, the impacts of just-in-time-training on both EHR satisfaction and training satisfaction for not only their clients, but the broader AC community. So, correct me if I’m wrong, but given what has been shared, it’s from you both, it seems that you’re building great momentum and just a deeper understanding of how health systems can really improve their EHR satisfaction and training overall.
CONNOR: Yeah. We believe that this is such a big problem that there isn’t a single group that can solve it on their own, right? So, we are here to help measure and validate how organizations are doing with their EHR satisfaction. The health systems are working as hard as they can to make it as usable for their clinicians as they can. The vendors, the software vendors, are developing the technology and trying to make it better and education, service firms are coming in and offering their expertise to help as well. And so, we’re of the opinion that all boats rise with the tide. And so, the more people in this bay, the better of we’ll be. And so things that we’re doing as we are partnering with vendors like uPerform…We’re validating the success that they’ve seen with some of their clients, and we’re getting the message out, trying to say that you’re not alone and you don’t have to do this on your own. And if you need a partner, then find a partner and work with them. Because there are lots of people here who can help. And everyone needs a little boost in their sails sometimes.
LIZ: Absolutely. This has been an incredible partnership, probably for me personally, just because I’m very personally invested in both of these organizations and this work overall. What’s been really, really cool is in getting to work both with our clients and having them share their own success stories, but then for them to be able to measure that and validate that as Baylor Scott and White was able to do against this very robust data system, or – I’m sorry – data sample. The Arch Collaborative research is rock solid. I mean, again, over 200 organizations over, gosh, Connor, correct me – close to 350,000 survey responses?
CONNOR: Yeah, we’re getting close to 350,000 now.
LIZ: That’s awesome. This data isn’t going anywhere. This research isn’t going anywhere. And I’m absolutely with Connor. We all rise together, and we are all in the business of trying to improve healthcare. We’re going to do – you know, KLAS Arch Collaborative is going to do that by helping them understand where they stand today, how they can partner with not only other health systems to learn from them, but partner with vendors who can help them improve as well. From uPerform’s perspective, we want to help healthcare improve one organization at a time by helping them understand how to make this transition, how to be successful in a world that is going to force them down a virtual road as part of that quiver, whether they like it or not. There have been so many organizations that we talk to that say, ‘We can’t go back to the classroom. Our classrooms were physically repurposed into something else in our health system. We don’t have a classroom anymore. We have to make this transition.’ We also see with mergers and acquisitions, health systems are getting physically larger and larger and larger. They’re covering vast geographical areas to add onto the burdens of our clinicians. To say, ‘Oh, and you have to drive two hours each way to get to this onboarding class.’ That might impact my decision as a nurse of which health system I’m going to join. And so we have to say this isn’t just about improving training. It’s about how do we improve our ability to attract and retain great talent? Well, we do that by empowering. Everyone wants to be empowered. This is, you know, not even just in healthcare today. Like, we talk about the great resignation and quiet quitting. All of these things. One of the best ways to improve satisfaction of any employee is empowerment.
We truly believe at uPerform that empowerment happens when you place knowledge in the hands of your users, and whether that comes for the EHR, or your ERP, or your Rev Cycle, there’s a lot of technology, and as someone who personally struggles to adopt new technology, I am thrilled to get the opportunity to work with both organizations and say, first of all, ‘Hey, here’s one great avenue to measure where you’re at, and here’s a really great product to support you from a technology and process standpoint to support your people.’
It's been a lot of fun. We’re really looking forward to just continuing this together and just really, really excited about it.
JACOB: Absolutely. Well, I know this has just been such an interesting topic to learn more about, and I know we here at Becker’s will also be so interested in following this for years to come. Connor and Liz, thank you so much for providing your time and insights to us today.
CONNOR: Yeah, thank you for having us.
LIZ: Yeah, absolutely. Like I say, I’m the weirdo that’ll talk about it for hours to anybody who will listen.
JACOB: Fantastic. Well, we also want to thank our podcast sponsor, uPerform, for this engaging content. uPerform is a just-in-time learning platform that bolts onto your EHR, ERP, HCM and other enterprise applications to centralize software training and support. uPerform gets clinicians through onboarding to patient care faster, while better preparing them with a personalized toolkit for efficiency within the EHR, alleviating friction and resulting in more satisfied EHR users. You can learn more about how uPerform can turn training time into patient time at uperform.com. You can also tune into more podcasts from Becker’s Healthcare by visiting the Becker’s podcast page at beckershospitalreview.com.