EHR Lessons Learned: Week 4

by: Navy Capt. Michael Weiner
DHIMS Deputy Program Manager and Chief Medical Officer

Wednesday, April 21, 2010

For a few weeks now, I have been blogging about the biggest lessons learned regarding electronic health records from the perspective of a military doctor and officer. I’ve stressed the work flow as possibly the most important consideration, whether you are looking at work flow in general, the software to acquire or the hardware to make it all work smoothly. This week, the simplicity of use is our topic because intuitive tools are much easier to promote adoption.

EHRs should be intuitive.

Learning a new EHR as a practicing clinician should take no longer than the time it takes a teenager to master a video game. Purchasing an intuitive system helps promote work flow to aid with quick adoption and deliver immediate benefits. The goal of any EHR adoption is to leverage modern technologies for greater clinical efficiency, higher quality and safer delivery of care.

Intuitive systems still require training, but the “ah-ha” moment shouldn’t take years to achieve. Anytime a new system is installed, whether it is word processing software, a new phone or something as mechanically simple as a bicycle, it shouldn’t take a long time to figure out if it is similar to what someone is already used to dealing with. Intuitive systems are critical but so is how you communicate this change to your employees and beneficiaries. Can you succeed in using a new bicycle without knowing it was coming and then hop on to discover that you now have to pedal with your hands, the wheels are square and the brakes are part of the seat? How can this be maneuvered? If you allow a software genius to design an EHR system that is easy and intuitive for him or her, that is how difficult it may seem for an everyday user. Instead, the system has to be intuitive to the users and act like other software they would normally deal with at home or at work, and you have to help them understand and appreciate why this change is for the better. For the MHS, our initial dive into a robust EHR wasn’t as bad as my bicycle analogy, but it wasn’t as easy as walking into your local super electronics store and purchasing the most common software for word-processing and expecting for everyone in your house to be able to use it without extensive training either.

Finding an EHR that is easy for medical providers to understand, use and operate would go a very long way in increasing adoption and satisfaction among the users. Regardless of how intuitive a system is, training is still important to ensure everyone has at least the same baseline knowledge and additional functions are revealed to them. Next week, I will discuss the type of training that I know makes MHS providers the happiest with EHRs.