Using Team-Based Approaches to EHR Usability, EHR Optimization

Better EHR usability leads to higher EHR adoption rates, fewer clinical errors, lower clinician burnout rates, financial benefits, and improved patient safety.

The EHR SWAT team collected and prioritized information and EHR optimization requests from their respective colleagues. Priority groups included re-education (immediate EHR training fix), quick fixes (six-week optimization), future fixes (over one-year optimization), and optimizations that are unable to fix due to technical or regulatory restraints.

Next, the group initiated meetings with the separate clinical divisions to notify colleagues of how they will prioritize the EHR optimization challenges.

EHR documentation, EHR workflow navigation, EHR alerts, and prescribing were the most common training requests. Increasing EHR notifications, updating order sets, adding documentation templates, and implementing autotext to ease documentation were the most common quick fixes.