Real-Time Responses To EMR Training

Teaching hospital staffers and clinicians to use your EMR is a hard enough job. Figurng out just what they didn’t learn during training is even harder. But here’s a trick some hospital administrators and IT leaders are using to do just that.

A report in the HealthTechZone blog notes that at St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago, they’ve already seen some success with a technology that allows audiences to respond to quizzes embedded in EMR training materials.

The hospital’s training sessions use a polling software application called TurningPoint which allows audience members to respond to questions in real time, using either their smart phones or “ResponseCard” keypads. The technology also allows presenters to bring in audience members not in the room at presentation time and collect their responses to polls remotely.

At St. Joseph, administrators use this technology to structure their EMR training sessions more effectively and focus in on areas where the audience seems not to have understood what was presented.  It’s as simple as sending the training group on a break, reviewing the quiz and reorganizing PowerPoint slides to re-emphasize any points that the audience missed.

But the response technology’s use doesn’t end there, the blog reports. Once the formal training is over, administrators hand audience polling results to the IT team. IT administrators then use the data to address employee concerns as they proceed with the EMR rollout.

I think this is a great approach, not only for training but for gauging employee (and clinician) support for the EMR rollout, gathering input on the effectiveness of the EMR in users’ daily work lives, and generally fostering EMR acceptance by having a finger on the pulse of user sentiment.  Readers, have you tried anything like this?