A Cerner Implementation creates a transitionary event for any organization. With it, you are making a huge investment in technology and other resources that should provide savings in both time and money, while helping to enhance the care of your patients. To realize these rewards, though, it is critical to provide effective and comprehensive training of your new Cerner system to all your employees who will interact with and be impacted by the application.
The Importance of Cerner Training for Your Staff
It’s not uncommon for a Cerner (or any other EHR) implementation to be met with some resistance from staff members. After all, the transition to any new technology can be intimidating for your physicians, nurses and administrative personnel.
The good news is that providing Cerner training has proven to bring a number of benefits to an organization, beyond simply accepting and acquiring technical competency for the system. Proper training can positively impact your staff’s understanding of how the Cerner technology can be leveraged to improve your clinical operations while enhancing the patient experience through increased efficiencies.
In fact, studies have shown that Cerner training isn’t just helpful, but that it’s an essential element of a successful implementation. An introductory and ongoing Cerner training program can help your organization prevent errors, minimize employee frustration, and avoid other general setbacks while facilitating smooth operations.
Four Tips to Help Build a Successful Cerner Training Program
Below, we outline four proven Cerner training tips to get your staff adequately trained and comfortable with your new system:
Identify Employee Computer Skills
This is especially important for organizations where that are converting from paper-intensive processes. If your employees have not been in the habit of performing complex tasks on a computer, incorporating these basic skills into your training program will be a critical element to your success.
Designate Your “Power Users”
These will be the users learn your Cerner system very well and will serve as the go-to people for any questions about the system other staff may have. Your Power Users will be responsible for offering tips and shortcuts and may take on the responsibility of showing new employees how to navigate the system.
Train Employees on the Areas that are Relevant to Them
Rather than try to train every employee on all aspects of the Cerner system, provide focused training that teaches them just the features they need to know to perform their job role. This approach to training will minimize learning time and allow you to fully leverage your Cerner investment as quickly as possible.
Ask for feedback
Your Cerner training program should not end after implementation. Instead, you should pursue employee feedback to understand how well their use of the system is going and which components of the system are still areas of confusion. This information will allow you to expand and revise your training to ensure optimal use of the system.
A Cerner Training Checklist
As you design your Cerner training program, refer to this checklist to help ensure that you are building a comprehensive program that will provide the best possible return:
Build a training team that includes key stakeholders
Gather all possible data to assess training needs
Identify your training goals
Outline a training plan
Build your training timeline
Identify your Power Users
Choose your best training methods given your defined training needs and organization resources
Build your training schedules
Revise and expand the training program based on staff feedback
Leverage Cerner Training Materials to Build an eLearning Program
In recent years, as online technologies have continued to evolve, eLearning has emerged as a cornerstone approach to Cerner training as it provides a flexible and cost-effective approach to getting your staff up to speed quickly on the Cerner application and measuring their knowledge and progress with the system.
One of the most valuable aspects of eLearning is in the opportunity it provides to re-purpose existing Cerner learning materials for the creation of eLearning courses. Learning content in the form of videos, PDFs, images, Docs, and other formats can all be quickly and easily deployed as eLearning content to provide a valuable and measurable component of your Cerner training program.
At LMS Portals, we provide a cloud-based solution that will allow your organization to launch and manage its own corporate-branded eLearning portal. The foundation of these online courses can be your existing Cerner training materials. And the LMS Portals platform includes powerful supporting tools for online communication and collaboration, employee onboarding, program feedback, analysis, and more.
Contact us today to get started for free!