Training should be looked at as an ongoing process done throughout the life of your EMR. With new developments being added so frequently to the EMR systems, it’s important that your office takes advantage of these new features and receive proper training. One of the many benefits of EMR is its ability to standardize your offices workflow. When new staff is hired it makes just as much sense to have them trained on the EMR by the vendor where they will learn new features of the system instead of having them trained by a member of your staff. Using a combination of both will ensure that your new hires understand how to leverage the many features of an EMR while understanding the workflow of your office.
Vendors have a tendency to not provide enough training in their initial training packages or to rush through training in an effort to wrap up the implementation and move on to the next implementation. To maximize the training plan, do it in stages to give your staff adequate time to learn how to use the modules they’ve recently learned before moving on to new modules. Every office learns at a different pace so be prepared to purchase additional training, should you find that you or your staff is not ready to go live. A classroom setting can be helpful in the preliminary training phases, especially if 10+ more staff members need to be trained. Doing remote training over the internet for the preliminary training phases is both cost-effective and spreads the training load out.
A Train-the-Trainer approach is a strategy that can work very well. This is usually someone with a strong understanding on computers and can take a lighter workload during the implementation phase to train others. This also helps in that it creates a single point of contact between the vendor and the organization.
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