Electronic Health Record Implementation Training: A Crucial Step

While training office staff and clinicians is one of the larger investments of electronic health record (EHR) implementation, EHR implementation training is crucial to realizing the full potential of your EHR. You can use the following training strategies and lessons from the field to ensure your organization is ready for EHR implementation.

Electronic Health Record Implementation Training Strategies

• Super User Training: One effective training strategy is to take advantage of vendor training to create a group of "super users." Super users are staff members trained to move through the electronic health record (EHR) system quickly and can share helpful hints, tips, and techniques. Your core group of EHR supers users can provide internal training to office staff and clinicians. Super user training is a crucial component of an EHR training plan, because super users combine specialized EHR training with training on how the EHR will be used in your organization for your specific workflow and patient population.¹
• Role-Based Training: Another effective training strategy is to tailor training sessions to the roles and responsibilities of your staff. Focus on how each staff group (e.g., clinical providers, office staff, IT support staff, etc.) will be using the EHR system and design training sessions that will best suit their needs.²
• Process-Based Training: Introducing an EHR system into your practice/hospital/health center will affect your workflows. Process-based training will help your staff understand the new workflows. For example, you should use process-based training to train users on how your practice/hospital/health center will provide clinical summaries for patients.³

For more information about these and other training strategies, see the California HealthCare Foundation’s Training Strategies: EHR Deployment Techniques.

For More Information

For more information about training your staff, see the following resources.

• What training resources are available for electronic health record implementation?
• Who should train my staff?
• What training materials are available?
• Designing Effective Training