Telehealth: Improving Patient Outcomes and Staff Satisfaction through Standardized Clinical Message Management Classes

Purpose: Design and implement an interactive, experiential clinical message management (CMM) class to provide ambulatory care clinical staff with intensive training to gain in-depth knowledge and competency in managing EMR clinical messages in a safe and timely manner using standardized workflows. Improve patient quality and safety outcomes by decreasing message response times and touchpoints. Increase staff satisfaction in their roles by providing relevant and comprehensive training materials.
Description: A large academic healthcare system (AHS) transitioned to a new electronic medical record (EMR) system in October 2022. The EMR vendor trained the AHS staff prior to go-live using their proprietary training modules via their virtual platform.
The EMR system’s training modules focused primarily on the technical steps and functionalities for managing various types of clinical messages. It did not incorporate content specific to the AHS’s workflows. Furthermore, the compendium of training materials provided by the EMR vendor only addressed the technical aspects of working clinical messages within the EMR and did not include practical steps that aligned with the AHS’s specific workflows.
Immediately after go-live, the AHS’s ambulatory care services noticed an astronomical increase in clinical message volumes, call volumes, message touchpoints, turnaround times, and patient complaints. Staff also voiced frustrations about the lack of relevant EMR training prior to go-live and reference materials that they felt did not adequately prepare them to competently perform their job functions.
As a result, ambulatory care created a CMM class for existing and new staff to receive comprehensive training on how to correctly manage clinical messages according to the organization’s specific workflows within the new EMR system. Standardized workflows, step-by-step job aids, interactive case-based clinical message scenarios, and demonstration videos were created.
Evaluation/outcome: Data was obtained and analyzed post-implementation of the CMM class. Accomplishments included a 70% decrease in patient complaints from 90 per month to 27 per month, a 59% decrease in message response times from 2.3 days to 0.95 days, and staff reports of increased satisfaction and competency via the post-class survey.