No EHR Training Needed

Anne Zieger over on EHR Outlook just posted an article talking about the need of training on an EHR. In the article, she quotes Dr. Bertman, CEO of EMR company Amazing Charts (Full Disclosure: They’re a sponsor of this site). Here’s one excerpt from the article:

According to Dr Jonathan Bertman, if you need extensive training to use an EHR, you shouldn’t buy it. “Doctors know how to be doctors,” he says. “They shouldn’t have to be trained to be software technicians – if they need training than it’s not a good thing.”

Here was my response in the comments of the article (and a little additional commentary for this post):
I have a feeling Dr. Bertman and I agree about training, but I think it’s over the top for him to say, “if they need training than it’s not a good thing.” Certainly many EHR software vendors require far too much training. I think that’s the point he’s trying to make and I agree 100%. However, the reality is that there are a whole lot of people that get training even on Office. In fact, there’s a whole entire industry around training on Office products. So, EHR is going to have training as well.

Another excerpt from the article:

“Compare them to Microsoft Office,” Dr. Bertman suggests. “It’s a powerful tool, but you usually don’t need special training to use it. An EHR is not more complicated than Office, and that’s how we should be looking at them.”

I’d generally disagree that an EHR is not more complicated than Office. The reality is that what you want to do in an EHR is more complicated than Office. Sure, if all I want to do is type a little bit and maybe click bold, then I’m fine. Most EHR you don’t need any training to login, browse their appointment grid, browse patients, and even create notes.

The reason for the EHR training that’s out there isn’t for these simple features. It’s for the more advanced features like is done in most Office trainings. I could be wrong, but I believe Dr. Bertman generally agrees with me on this, but it wasn’t expressed in a short quote from him.

One other interesting point is that I think a lot of people call it EHR training when in fact it’s about EHR workflow planning and training. You’re a brave person to implement an EHR without planning out your current workflows and how they’ll map to an EHR workflow. I often see this workflow planning and training covered under the broad definition of EHR training.

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

3 Comments

  • Great point. I’d also like to include that most offices would look at you funny if you didn’t have any training planned at all. A lot of times training creates piece of mind for the customer as a part of the package.

  • Well John, I’m kinda at a loss for words – not my norm when it comes to this topic. However, I’m pretty sure you know where I stand on this issue. I invite your readers to check out a couple of my blogs on the importance of training in a healthcare environment.

    Which is more important: Education, Training or Teaching?
    http://tinyurl.com/3thr542

    Why do We Need Customized EMR/EHR Training? – My Final Answer! http://tinyurl.com/3c3du7n

  • Jonena,
    I think you agree with us that many of the EHR software is too hard and should be made much easier to use to make EHR training easier right? I think that was what he meant, but it came out as something different.

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