Electronic health records (EHR) systems are mission-critical to the day-to-day operations of healthcare providers, doctor offices, and hospital networks. EHR systems enhance patient care, streamline operations, and improve patient management.
However, the success of these investments depends on EHR user adoption. Without proper user onboarding, healthcare professionals cannot correctly utilize the system, lack the training to adopt it, and experience long time-to-value.
In this article, we’ll explore the process of EHR user onboarding and unpack why it’s so important. We’ll also provide strategies to maximize the effectiveness of your EHR user onboarding programs to set your healthcare staff up for success.
What Is EHR User Onboarding?
EHR user onboarding is the structured process of introducing healthcare professionals to a new Electronic Health Record system. This goes beyond basic software training and helps ensure all staff can use the system in their daily work. In fact, an excellent onboarding experience can increase early productivity by 70 percent.
EHR onboarding aims to build user confidence and accelerate the path to proficiency. This way, you can make the most of your EHR investment and support better adoption across your healthcare organization.
3 Key Components of an Effective EHR User Onboarding Strategy
Are you wondering how you can make the most of your EHR system and easily onboard new users? Here are three effective EHR user onboarding strategies.
1. Personalized onboarding plans
Onboarding must always be tailored to the employee’s goals and requirements. Personalized employee training programs take a learner-centric approach to ensure a relevant pathway to discovering EHR capabilities.
How does this work? For example, user-level segmentation helps you create personalized onboarding experiences. This way, employees can get behind the “why” of implementing this new system more quickly and provide role-based onboarding and training to their healthcare staff to quickly understand how to utilize the new EHR system.
2. In-app support tools
When onboarding, users must deal with a lot of information. In-app support can make it easier for them along the way. In-app support overlays instructions and helpful content right within the same user interface, so there’s no need to switch apps.
Examples of in-app guidance capabilities include:
- Tooltips
- Pop-ups
- In-app tutorials
- Tours and walkthroughs
This assistance powers self-service and boosts productivity. The right resources show up just in time. Exactly when and where they’re needed. This way, users can understand how to interact with the new system as they engage naturally.
3. Interactive onboarding and training sessions
There can often be a gap between what employees already know and the information they’ll need to thrive in with a new system. This is part of what makes onboarding so important. But all onboarding programs aren’t created equally. They have much more impact when employees can connect to the material.
Build a thoughtful and effective onboarding program with interactive training and personalized training material. This type of onboarding boosts engagement and can improve employee experience. It also helps integrate new hires into the team faster.
How to Enable New EHR Users With Whatfix
EHR user onboarding is critical in enabling healthcare staff to drive value from the system, ultimately empowering healthcare organizations to achieve healthcare transformation outcomes.
1. Enable end-users with role-based, in-app guided EHR onboarding
Different roles, from doctors to nurses, may have different workflow requirements. A digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix enables healthcare organizations to provide contextual in-app live tutorials and user support in the flow of work.
With Whatfix DAP, create in-app EHR user onboarding elements such as Tours and Task Lists to provide new users with a guided experience that enables them to quickly realize value and understand how it is used to achieve their day-to-day activities.
This caters directly to the needs of specific job roles by eliminating redundant or unnecessary information and provides hands-on training to EHR users.
2. Provide hands-on simulation training with an EHR sandbox environment
Medical data is sensitive. Training on an EHR in a live environment has the potential to create risk, which is increasingly important to pay attention to. According to the HIPAA Journal, 2023 surpassed all previous records, with an astonishing 133 million records exposed, stolen, or otherwise impermissibly disclosed.
Whatfix Mirror provides organizations with a no-code tool to create replicant IT sandbox environments of your EHR system. This provides end-users with a hands-on interactive training experience where they can engage with your EHR and its workflows without impacting your real-life application and its data.
3. Provide learning in the flow of work for continuous EHR training
Digital health is now more prominent. The digital health market was worth over 170B in 2024. That means more technology and software for your staff to use.
How do you get them to use it? The first step is smart onboarding that meets them where they are. Your staff shouldn’t have to guess where an EHR will fit into their day-to-day work. Instead, design an ongoing training program that supports them after onboarding as well.
A digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix enables learning in the flow of work via context-sensitive in-app guidance such as walkthroughs and self-help embedded directly within the EHR interface.
4. Enable EHR self-help support
What if your employees could quickly find answers to any EHR software support-related question they encounter? By giving them access to self-help resources, you can move toward that reality.
Whatfix DAP enables EHR users anytime with Self-Help. Self-help overlays your EHR UI and provides a searchable help center that integrates with your LMS, EHR SOPs, training resources, videos, third-party links, and more.
This aggregates all your EHR processes and support documentation into one in-app help center. Whatfix tracks user searches to identify where support is needed more, helping you create new support articles or training sessions your users need.
5. Collect post-onboarding feedback
Onboarding programs aren’t something you should set and forget. There’s always room for improvement. However, to find those opportunities, you need to offer a channel for users to give feedback.
Whatfix provides healthcare application owners and IT managers with a tool to create in-app surveys to collect EHR feedback inside their applications. These can be open- or close-ended questions, surveys, questionnaires, interviews, and focus groups designed around different parts of the product experience, from ease of use to effectiveness.
6. Use end-user analytics to EHR identify friction
If your staff runs into a sticking point with an EHR system, they may be less likely to use it. But if you can pinpoint the moments causing friction, you can find ways to resolve them. This way, all the effort you put into training and onboarding doesn’t go to waste.
With Whatfix, track and analyze end-user behavior with User Actions. This empowers real estate IT teams to identify areas of end-user friction, map optimal user flows, build flows for different user cohorts, and more. Use this data to create new in-app guidance and end-user support content and continuously optimize and test new workflows and features to create more efficient, user-friendly technology experiences that drive value.
EHR Software Clicks With Whatfix
Accelerate your healthcare digital transformation efforts by enabling your employees and patients with contextual in-app guidance and constant real-time support via Whatfix digital adoption platform (DAP).
Whatfix provides EHR application owners and healthcare IT teams with a comprehensive no-code platform to enable EHR users, drive EHR adoption, and achieve healthcare business outcomes with frictionless digital healthcare experiences.
With Whatfix:
- Enable EHR end-users with contextual, role-based in-app onboarding and training with Whatfix in-app guidance with experiences like Tours, Flows, and Task Lists.
- Provide on-demand self-help support for EHR end-users with Whatfix Self Help and identify common troubleshooting issues with Guidance Analytics.
- Build EHR sandbox environments for simulated hands-on healthcare training with Whatfix Mirror.
- Collect EHR end-user feedback with Whatfix Surveys
- Analyze EHR end-user behavior to identify areas of digital friction and map optimal healthcare workflows with Whatfix Analytics.
With Whatfix, you can understand how your healthcare technology is used and under-adopted by your employees and patients. This makes it easier to adjust software onboarding, training, support, and overall end-user adoption strategies—all to provide a seamless experience for every end-user that enables them with the right context and support to utilize new technologies and systems fully.
Intrigued to learn more about Whatfix? Click here to schedule a free demo with us today!
What Is Whatfix?
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that provides organizations with a no-code editor to create in-app guidance on any application that looks 100% native. With Whatfix, create interactive walkthroughs, product tours, task lists, smart tips, field validation, self-help wikis, hotspots, and more. Understand how users are engaging with your applications with advanced product analytics.
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Software Clicks With Whatfix
Whatfix's digital adoption platform empowers your employees, customers, and end-users with in-app guidance, reinforcement learning, and contextual self-help support to find maximum value from software.
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What Is a Digital Adoption Platform?
DAPs enable technology users with contextual in-app guidance and real-time support to guide them through business processes and to learn in the flow of work.