Electronic health records (EHR) systems are mission-critical to the day-to-day operations of healthcare providers, doctor offices, and hospital networks. Nurses, doctors, technicians, and front-office staff all use EHRs to update and check patient historical records, communicate with patients, schedule and manage visits, add prescriptions, and more.
To support its employees and enable effective EHR adoption, healthcare organizations must provide contextual EHR support to all staff members. This is more important than ever, as 88% of office-based physicians use an EHR.
EHR support empowers organizations to drive maximum value from their digital investments and assists end-users in using the system correctly and effectively.
In this article, we’ll explore how healthcare organizations can support their EHR users to overcome EHR-related issues, close knowledge gaps, and ultimately maximize their efficiency and productivity. We’ll discuss how healthcare providers can support their EHR users with help desk IT support, in-app guidance, knowledge bases, and more.
What Is EHR End-User Support?
EHR End-User Support refers to the assistance provided to healthcare professionals and staff who use Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. This support ensures that end-users can effectively and efficiently use the EHR system to perform their daily tasks, which include accessing patient records, documenting clinical notes, managing appointments, and handling billing processes. The support can encompass a variety of services, such as technical help, training, troubleshooting, and guidance on best practices.
Key Components of an Effective EHR End-User Support Strategy
Building a top-notch EHR support program requires deploying a powerful mix of resources and capabilities. Three foundational elements to prioritize include 24/7 helpdesks, in-app guidance tools, and comprehensive knowledge bases.
1. 24/7 help desk services
Healthcare is a round-the-clock operation. Your EHR support needs to have that same 24/7 availability. Giving clinicians and staff access to real human assistance at any hour is important. It can help you avoid delays and risks.
Many workflows, such as emergency admissions or medication orders, can’t afford to wait until the next business day. If any of your staff needs help with the EHR, they need a path to get help right away.
When evaluating help desk systems, look for ones with:
- Multi-channel support, including live chat, email, and phone support.
- Call logistics software to reduce wait times.
- Screen sharing for efficient troubleshooting.
- Integration with other IT service desks.
You’ll also want clear processes for escalating complex issues. Will you have a leader on staff that your healthcare workers go to first? Be clear about who to contact and when to keep operations going smoothly.
2. In-app support tools
When EHR users experience friction in their workflows, in-app support can provide interactive, live tutorials in the flow of work to overcome issues. In-app guidance tools overlay instructions and helpful content right within the same user interface, so there’s no need to toggle between apps.
Examples of in-app support capabilities include:
- Interactive walkthroughs
- Smart tips and hints
- Guided live tutorials
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, your staff may be able to problem-solve before small issues become bigger operational challenges.
With a digital adoption platform (DAP) like Whatfix, healthcare organizations can enable EHR end-users with in-app guided experiences that assist users in the flow of work. With Whatfix, use a no-code editor to create in-app content like Flows, Task Lists, and Smart Tips to provide contextual, role-based guidance embedded directly into your healthcare workers’ tasks and processes.
Whatfix Self Help integrates with your healthcare organization’s knowledge repositories, including company policies, SOPs, LMS modules, EHR training resources, etc., and overlays your EHR system’s UI. Employees can use its search function to find any contextual process or help documentation without leaving the application.
3. Comprehensive knowledge base
Even with live support and in-app tools, a knowledge base is still part of effective EHR user enablement. This houses all your support documentation, from training videos to troubleshooting guides.
When building out a knowledge base, make sure you factor in:
- Clean information architecture with intuitive categories
- Version control and content authoring workflows
- Analytics to identify knowledge gaps based on consumption
Also, commit to refreshing your knowledge base content regularly. Set a schedule for reviews and updates. More accurate and complete documentation is needed to ensure people understand.
How to Provide Real-Time EHR Support With a DAP
Support elements such as helpdesks and knowledge bases are important, but advanced technologies can help you speed up healthcare digital transformation. By integrating a DAP, you can create an exceptional user experience while driving proficiency—all without being reliant on 1:1 support. Here’s how to make that a reality.
1. Create role-based EHR end-user guidance
Effective end-user support requires personalization based on roles and user personas. For example, a physician’s needs differ from an administrator’s. With a DAP like Whatfix, you can build tailored guidance for each EHR user group.
This includes:
- Interactive walkthroughs for common clinical workflows
- Smart tips explaining billing terminologies
- Pop-ups that include embedded videos showing how to generate reports.
This targeted approach ensures that users receive only the information pertinent to their tasks, reducing confusion and improving efficiency.
2. Provide real-time support at the moment of need
As all staff members get comfortable with an EHR, they’ll still need some help along the way. You must be able to support them when and where they need it most. But how do you reach them?
With Whatfix’s digital adoption platform (DAP), enable your technology end-users with contextual in-app guidance and moment-of-need support. With Whatfix’s no-code visual editor, non-technical team members can create in-app experiences that engage users and assist in the workflow.
Furthermore, Whatfix self-help widget provides answers to all kinds of user queries without having to raise support tickets.
Don’t leave your people to struggle. Drive user adoption by curating knowledge from across your enterprise applications and contextualizing it for your employees, all within the application at the moment of their need.
3. Localize your end-user support content
Many healthcare systems rely on multilingual workforces to support diverse populations. Don’t let language barriers hold your staff back from EHR technology. Many DAPs provide localization capabilities to translate all your guidance resources, ensuring a consistent experience for staff and patients.
Examples of localized assets include:
- Subtitled videos explaining documentation workflows
- Smart tips with terminology mapping
- Multilingual PDFs for clinic procedures
4. Use analytics to find friction
Creating user guidance isn’t enough. You have to optimize it based on real user experiences and friction points. This is where DAP analytics can help. You can find patterns and uncover where your team may be struggling.
From there, a DAP can give you the tools to update and enhance your existing user guidance. You could redesign a clunky workflow to something that suits your users better. Or you can provide more tool tips for the flow of work. All of this can be driven by data.
Examples of DAP End User Support Use Cases
Do you wonder what benefits DAP end-user support has when you put it into practice? See how three organizations improved their end-user support and boosted digital adoption.
1. Sentry insurance saved nearly $1M with better user onboarding & self-help support
Sentry was using simple tools to direct Sales, Customer Service, and Claims teams to training resources. To improve efficiency, the organization needed to provide a better experience to stakeholders. Sentry selected a Whatfix digital adoption and experience layer to support digital transformation and adoption.
With Whatfix, it takes around 20 hours to create an item of content, compared to up to 50 hours previously. These time savings add up rapidly—one Sentry application can have 500+ training content items.
They were also able to drastically reduce the resources required for training. Whatfix enables agents and other staff to use the applications without leveraging webinars or instructor-led sessions.
2. REG enables its Salesforce CRM and JDEdwards end-users with in-app guidance
REG was growing fast. The challenge for REG has been to ensure its employees—especially new hires—are aligned with this growth. REG needs people joining the company to be productive in the shortest possible time on critical operational applications like JD Edwards and Salesforce.
REG has standardized Whatfix’s DAP to provide continuous learning at the moment of need. The comprehensive and connected Whatfix digital guidance platform provides contextual, interactive, automated user guidance – driving additional adoption and productivity gains across REG applications.
By simplifying software adoption and use, employees are more productive on critical applications – and adapt to application changes more quickly. This agility enables REG to react faster to green energy opportunities and grow revenue. Time to proficiency on applications has been cut by around 50%.
3. Ferring Pharmaceutical enables its Icertis end-users with in-app guidance and support
Founded in 1950, privately-owned Ferring employs over 7,000 people worldwide. The company has subsidiaries in over 50 countries and markets its products in over 100 countries. They needed to streamline processes around contract management.
Whatfix’s connected digital adoption platform (DAP) guided Ferring employees through the complexities of thousands of Icertis contract tasks and workflows, improving the user experience and accelerating contract execution.
This freed up more time for users to focus on their business and allowed the Legal Operations team to spend more time on legal services innovation. They decreased support tickets by 33% in a single quarter. They also averaged 97% user-search success when using Self Help.
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 empowers healthcare IT teams with its no-code visual editor to create in-app, moment-of-need support and contextual guidance—all inside your software applications and digital processes. This reduces time to proficiency and achieves new levels of productivity and proficiency through better healthcare technology adoption for all end-users.
How does it work? Whatfix empowers healthcare organizations to:
- Create in-app flows and task lists that guide end-users step-by-step through digital processes and applications.
- Enable all end-users with self-help, providing a searchable help wiki that connects to all your help and support documentation, FAQs, help desk articles, and more – that overlays on your applications’ digital UI.
- Notify end-users of process updates, compliance changes, team updates, and more with pop-ups and beacons.
- Provide contextual smart tips that give end-users timely information that nudges them to take the correct in-app action.
- Collect end-user feedback such as NPS, customer satisfaction surveys, staff training and onboarding feedback, and bug identification with in-app surveys.
- Analyze end-user behavior with user actions and enterprise insights by tracking custom in-app events to optimize user journeys, segment users into cohorts, identify areas of friction, and more.
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!
