Improving the Epic experience. Revolutionizing health care.
Did you know that while you’re caring for patients and working in Epic, there are health care organizations and clinicians working together to help improve your experience?
Through the clinician-led, KLAS-supported Arch Collaborative, valuable feedback from thousands of clinicians is continuously captured and evaluated to help make EHR systems like Epic easier to use. Soon, Houston Methodist providers and nurses will have the opportunity to participate in the Arch Collaborative survey and provide their own meaningful feedback.
“Arch Collaborative participation will give us insight into what our providers and nurses are experiencing with Epic, driving future enhancement and implementation decisions,” said Robert A. Phillips, MD, PhD, FACC and Houston Methodist executive vice president and chief physician executive.
KLAS Research and the Arch Collaborative.
KLAS Research partners with thousands of health care systems worldwide to gather honest, impartial IT feedback from real-world experiences of frontline providers and nurses to improve health care-related IT products.
Five years ago, KLAS started the Arch Collaborative — a group of over 200 health care systems working together to better understand and improve the EHR experience for clinicians. Through standardized surveys and benchmarking, KLAS works with its members to improve EHR systems, like Epic, by gathering valuable clinician feedback to identify opportunities for change and ways to enhance the overall EHR experience. This initiative is improving clinical efficiency, retention and reducing burnout.
“Unlike consumer technology, like smartphones, EHR adoption and usage wasn’t driven by U.S. consumerism,” said Dr. Jordan Dale, HM chief medical information officer. “Unfortunately, from the beginning of EHR design and implementations, user needs weren’t prioritized, and there wasn’t any focus on reducing burden or maximizing the experience for clinicians. This has resulted in a global opportunity for us to work to improve the EHR experience for clinicians. The Arch Collaborative provides key opportunities and best practices to tackle that.”
What we measure, we can improve.
The Arch Collaborative has surveyed hundreds of thousands of clinicians, establishing a repository of meaningful feedback and valuable data to help find viable solutions to clinicians’ EHR frustrations. Over time, this data has helped uncover solutions that are consistent across various health care organizations — from small clinics to large hospital systems.
While HM has historically performed above the national average on its Physician Engagement survey around questions related to IT support and Epic, KLAS’s Arch Collaborative will allow HM to do a more in-depth evaluation of the Epic experience — and not just for our physicians but also our nurses.
“The KLAS survey will take a broad look at specific aspects of the Epic experience — initial training, continued support, key integrations and clinical teams’ engagement in core decisions,” said Dr. Dale. “All Houston Methodist physicians, APPs and nurses will be surveyed, and we’ll be able to benchmark our scores across over 200 organizations. This will help us make better IT decisions, with the goal of improving our clinical staff’s Epic satisfaction, facilitating better patient care.”
Comfort impacts performance.
Epic includes important tools that provide clinicians more streamlined workflows — it gives providers and nurses insight into each patient’s complete health care history and also allows them to do things like communicate with colleagues, specialists and even patients. All of these factors help clinicians make better care decisions, leading to better patient outcomes, so it’s important that clinicians are comfortable using Epic.
“Imagine if an airplane pilot stepped into a cockpit and wasn’t comfortable with how to operate his plane or didn’t know what half the buttons in the cockpit actually do,” said Dr. Dale. “The airline industry relies on pilot feedback to ensure their pilots are masters of the cockpit and are comfortable using all its tools. This ensures high levels of safety in that industry. We need to meet that same standard in health care for EHRs. No clinician can take care of a patient without utilizing the EHR, and we need to make sure they understand they are masters of that tool and comfortable using it.”
Ongoing support for our clinicians. Better patient care.
HM’s Arch Collaborative survey results will have an ongoing impact on HM providers and nurses — helping to improve overall efficiency and retention and reduce clinician burnout.
As Dr. Dale explains, “For me, there are three broad groups that contribute to clinicians’ EHR experience, the EHR vendor, the health system implementing the EHR and various regulatory or administrative bodies that add additional documentation burden. The Arch Collaborative helps us understand specific objectives that we either need to champion with Epic or various regulatory bodies, as well as quick changes that we control at the health system level to improve our clinicians’ experience and reduce burnout. It also demonstrates our desire to incorporate our providers’ and nurses’ voices into our key, future enhancements.”
Just like Epic provides clinicians with important insight into each patient’s health care history, the Arch Collaborative survey will give HM leaders insight into clinicians’ Epic experience. This will help them identify ways we can improve that experience and give them better tools and more time, so they can focus on caring for their patients.
“National nursing shortages have compelled us to look at every aspect of nursing care,” said Gail Vozzella, HMH chief nursing executive. “We know nurses are frustrated with the time they’re spending on documentation, leading to additional stress and burnout.”
“Hearing our nurses’ feedback will help us work to shift the EHR from nurses feeling documentation is a burden, to an accurate representation of the history and plan of care for each patient,” said Vozzella. “Each nurse’s time is invaluable now more than ever, and now’s the time to partner with frontline nurses to recreate an EHR that will work more efficiently for the entire health care team.”