Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Blog Question from the field....

How do you train the staff at your clinic? Who does the training? Where and when does it take place?

3 comments:

Michael Thompson said...
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Michael Thompson said...

This has always been a big issue for many of our smaller clinics.
It is hard to get more than just a couple of people at a time together to do training. Normally the option of closing down for any period of time for training is not something made available to us. Many times we have chosen to use WebEx training (using consultants and members of our CRIHB staff and or existing Superusers) with a small number of nurses/providers present at any given time.
The timing is difficult as well but if we can adjust schedules to allow training in shifts we find that we can allow the clinics to continue seeing patients and still have enough time to manage the training. It is difficult to take in more than a few hours of intense EHR training and still retain everything anyway, so we choose to break it up and try to train a few hours a week and also ask that the trainees be allowed to "practice/test" what they have learned before bringing them to the next training session.

Michael Aratow said...

Training at SMMC has been a significant organizational challenge. With limited space, hundreds of people to train, and specific time periods for training (just before go live) for the numerous groups, it took lots of hours just to figure out the logistics! We of course hired a trainer from the vendor, and our system administrator is becoming a certified trainer to handle post go live new hires. We try and train everyone the week before go live, and there is separate training sessions for providers, nurses/MAs and front office staff. Training runs anywhere from 8-12 hours, depending on the position. Because we have lots of part time staff, there were times that one on one training had to be conducted. Fortunately, most of our clinics were big enough to send half of their staff one day and the other half the next to preclude closure, but because of the sheer numbers of those who needed to be trained, we have wound up training up to 2 weeks before go live.