Onboarding is a process that helps new employees adapt to their new work environment by acquiring the knowledge, skills and competencies that will help them in succeeding in the new organization. Successful onboarding programs result in proficient employees with positive work attitudes that will help the organizations in moving closer to their goals.

Efficiently training a new joiner on using an organization’s electronic health record (EHR) can be a challenging part of the onboarding process. The Wareed training team makes significant efforts to ensure that all end users are trained up to optimal standards and keep all dependencies in view when designing their strategies. An effective onboarding program, designed with the key objectives in mind, will:

• Introduce the new joiner to the EHR documentation concepts well in advance so that they can commence their learning, thus reducing their dependency on scheduled sessions.
• Effectively manage the learning, taking into consideration the time constraints and limited interaction and practice duration during classroom training.
• Develop a mechanism to gauge the knowledge and skills of the target audience beforehand, which can help us in using a tailored learning approach for the users.
• Provide the new joiners with supplementary materials post-training to reinforce their learning and to continue their learning journey.

Moreover, having a structured onboarding program can successfully take the new joiners through an interactive and continued learning journey approach to improve their confidence in using the system. This will help them to utilize the functionalities effectively, thus enhancing patient care and safety.

Strategy and implementation

Wareed training rolled out the Wareed Onboarding Program for its new joiners on 1 October 2020. The aim of this program is to provide all new users with a continued learning journey experience by training them efficiently using a strategic approach.

Through this program, the training team further aims to improve the confidence of the users in using the Wareed health information system while documenting in their patient records.

To outline the process involved, every new user who joins a facility receives a welcome letter from their Wareed coordinator. This letter includes details about the program and introduces them to Wareed. Further to that, they are enrolled into Step 1 of the program by their Wareed coordinators or informatics nurse. On successful completion of this phase, the new user is registered to Step 2 – the instructor-led session – which also includes a competency exam they would need to pass. Lastly, they are enrolled into Step 3, where they complete their onboarding bundle, which comprises specific courses to reinforce their learning. This completes the whole onboarding program.

Key attributes of the program

Step 1: Maharati online course

The new user is introduced into the basic functionalities and documentation through the foundations courses part of Maharati, the learning management system. This is an online course where the new user can go through the various learning videos and will need to take the quiz to complete it. This is a prerequisite for the next stage, which is an instructor-led session.

Step 2: Instructor-led session

By taking the first step of the program, the new user gets an awareness of the documentation concepts through self-learning and can actively participate in the next stage, the instructor-led session. Furthermore, all the participants who come to the instructor-led session have the same basic level of understanding, which makes the training more efficient.

During this step, the new user is further introduced to the functionalities and documentation in detail, and they receive hands-on training to document in the system, which further enhances their confidence.

Step 3: Maharati onboarding bundle

Following the instructor-led session, the new users are enrolled into the final phase of the program, the onboarding bundle, which provides them with resources to reinforce their learning and provide additional information about documentation for their specialties. This ensures that the new user does not miss out any of the important concepts that they would come across in their specialty while documenting in the system.

The new user’s learning journey does not end there as they have access to the Wareed Knowledge Base, which takes them further by introducing them to new functionalities and enhancements as and when they are rolled out.

Results

Through this continuous learning support, the new user attains the confidence to use the system and adopt effective documentation methods.

Furthermore, it helps all the users in reinforcing and continuing their learning journey for an improved user experience, which ultimately helps them in providing better patient care and increased patient satisfaction. This is a well-thought-out program and these results highlight the strategies used in it.

The Wareed Onboarding Program reduced the training hours during the instructor-led sessions substantially. The training hours for certain user groups have in fact been reduced by 50%, while at the same time maintaining the quality of the sessions.

As of June 2021, there are over 900 new users trained and this comes to a total of 3,700 clinician hours saved; time that can be invested in better patient care delivery.

The Wareed training team, in collaboration with Cerner, will continue its efforts to further expand the program. This will include measures to check the adoption of the new joiners in their usage of functionalities and to support them in their learning journey.

The Wareed Onboarding Program takes continuous feedback from the users on their experience and below are their responses to date, showing our work in progress towards the overall goals of this program.

Feedback that has been received from the users:

“Easy to use, helpful in controlling my entities, which are helpful for evaluating, assessing and treating patients.”

“Very efficient and accessible, and very helpful that its accessible at any time.”

“Excellent opportunity to learn about Wareed documentation for beginners.”

“User friendly and easy to navigate.”

“Excellent step-by-step explanation, and in the flow, that helps to achieve your learning goal easily.”

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