A successful customized training program that will benefit your company as well as the employees and your patients is critical to the success of any new software implementation. This is especially true for EHRs and modules of the EHR.

Step 1. Perform a Training Requirements Analysis.
Assess the needs of your company and the goals that need to be accomplished with the training.  This also needs to be identified down to the job specific level of each user. Your analysis should include the basics of exactly what knowledge, skill set, and performance criteria each employee needs. This will help you in creating a training plan that will be built upon and you can have several employees in the same class.

Let’s use checking in a patient as an example.  Your front office staff will be the primary employees checking in patients so they will need to be able to perform that function leaving the training. The back office staff will need to have that knowledge and be able to demonstrate that skill set upon completion of the training. Both front and back office learn the same objective with a different outcome for each.

Be sure to gather direct input from the management and physicians as to what their expectations are from each employee and what they want each employee to accomplish with the job duties as defined and how they will be using the EHR.

Step 2. Create a Training Plan
Use the information you obtained in your analysis to create a training plan with standards defined with time, accuracy, measure accomplishment against criteria

Step 3. Create Training Material
You will need a lesson plan for each subject you want to teach. Each of those subjects should have a specific learning objective that supports the goals of your training plan.  You can easily break the subjects down into topics that support and to teach from. Other training materials needed could be instruction sheets, and test materials.

Not all training programs have to be extravagant multi-media presentations with professional trainers. Some of the best training programs are the hands on teaching approach with a designated employee presenting information on printed handouts working with the employees on the training computers.

Remember developing a great training program can take time. When creating your training program, weigh the costs between doing it yourself and hiring a professional.