25% of EHR Budget Goes to EHR Training…At Least for the DoD EHR

In all of the news surrounding Leidos and Cerner winning the DoD EHR bid, I was really struck by this one piece from Healthcare IT News:

Training. As is often the case in massive software implementations, training eats up a lot of the costs and, in the DoD’s case, “over 25 percent of the contract goes to training users and clinicians,” Miller said.

Think about how much training you can get for $1+ billion. I get that training is not cheap. I also get that the DoD EHR implementation is a massive project, but that’s a lot of money for training. Do you think that most EHR implementations spend 1/4 of their budget on training?

Hopefully people will chime in with their answer to that question in the comments. My experience is that hospitals probably should budget 1/4 of their budget for training, but most don’t get anywhere near that amount. Plus, the EHR training budget often starts much larger and then when the budget overruns start to happen, EHR training is one of the first places they go to cut the budget.

How much EHR training is enough in your experience? Should it be 25% of the budget? I’m not sure how much is needed, but I do know that most organizations don’t purchase enough. Sounds like the DoD might be the exception.