How Training Initiatives Helped Empower and Prepare Baylor Scott and White Health for COVID-19 (Part 2)

Part 2 of 3: Jerrie Rankin, VP of Operational Informatics with Baylor Scott & White Health and Nicholas Edwards, Senior Manager Enterprise Technical Training and Support, Baylor Scott & White Health join CHIME Media for a podcast to talk about how training initiatives helped empower and prepare their teams for the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ryan Seratt, Director of Training with 314e chats with Jerrie and Nicholas about this project, as 314e is a partners with their team.

The following is Part 2 of 3 blog posts of the full transcript for our recent CHIME Media podcast. Click here to read Part 1

Click here to listen to the Podcast recording on CHIME’s website

Leveraging Technology to Solve EHR Training Needs

Ryan Seratt: Jerrie, I think that the way that you’re leveraging technology to solve your training needs is really interesting. Could you provide a little bit more detail about the technical solution? You were speaking about?

Jerrie Rankin: Yes, absolutely. I’m going to hand it over to Nicholas Edwards. Nick is our technical lead guru. He is our leader of that team and can give you a lot more in-depth knowledge into the technical aspects. Nick, why don’t you take it away?

Nicholas Edwards: Thanks, Jerrie. We decided to implement Ancile and uPerform® in early 2019. uPerform® is really three different applications that solve multiple issues for us. First, it’s a content management system. The content management system allows us to curate all of our training materials in one location for both development and distribution purposes.

Ryan Seratt: Nick, Jerrie also mentioned a content management system. How’s that different than a learning management system that most people are familiar with? Can you describe the difference between the two?

Nicholas Edwards: Oh yeah, good question. Learning management systems are used to assign training to users and track completion. These are the systems that we use to assign things like Epic training for new hires or annual compliance training. With a content management system, it serves as a central repository for all of our development files as this replaces the old spreadsheets we’ve all used to track the status of content when developing for large projects. It allows us to see when content was last updated; we can assign trainers and SMEs to update that content, manage the different versions of that content, and report on all of our development activities. Secondly,uPerform® is a content development tool. That is, it can be used to create all of our training artifacts. This includes computer-based training courses with interactive simulation, tip sheets, videos, and more. It’s like combining software like Captivate or Storyline, or Screen Steps, which is an application used to create tip sheets. Lastly, it is a content deployment application that will actually integrate with Epic to provide context-specific training content via the uPerform® learning library. This means we can put links to training materials almost anywhere in Epic. Once the user clicks on the link, content that is specific to that area and that user will appear right there in a user’s workspace.

EHR Training Library

Ryan Seratt: I think your learning library is new technology that might interest a lot of people. Can you explain the difference between your LMS and your learning library and how they differ?

Nicholas Edwards: As you may know, we use an LMS to track user completion for new hire training. The learning library is really an upgrade to the old SharePoint site that we and so many other organizations use to store Epic tip sheets. The learning library is really for the end users, and it’s designed to support them in the flow of work. Overall, uPerform® is quite a powerful tool, and it allowed us, along with our partners from 314e, including you, Ryan, to convert all of our instructor-led training courses to computer-based training in just six months. That was over 155 plus hours of courses, which is an absurd amount of work to get done in that time frame. This is what laid the groundwork for us to begin doing so many cooler things with uPerform®.

Ryan Seratt: What does it take to implement a solution like uPerform®, as far as resources and time goes?

Nicholas Edwards: So, let’s start with the team. I have a somewhat small but mighty team, as Jerrie mentioned. The core of that team consists of three team members plus me. I have one DBA who set up our user provisioning, which grants our training team and end users access to the content management system and the learning library. This setup is crucial because we’re able to bring in user information from Epic, which allows us to associate training content with our Epic roles and make role-specific training materials available for them in the learning library. This way, physicians and other team members do not have to sort through a long list of documents that do not pertain to them. He also worked with our Citrix team to implement a Citrix redirect for the learning library URL. This is another vital component of the uPerform® Epic integration. This setup ensures that virtually no Citrix bandwidth is used as doctors and nurses access training documents, videos, or anything else in the learning library when accessing the uPerform® learning library from within Epic. By doing this, we were able to ensure our CMIO and IS leadership that integrating uPerform® with Epic would not negatively impact system performance.

The next team member is an instructional designer by trade. She designed all of the templates we use for content development. This allows trainers and SMEs to simply use the content development tool to capture screenshots, do some light editing, and produce a professionally designed course tip sheet or videos.

Last but not least, we have a Program Manager who ensures that all content is deployed to the correct location and role. This includes making sure all of our end users are put into groups in uPerform® and then making sure the documents are correctly associated with those groups.

EHR Training: Transition from Instructor-Led to Computer-Based Training Ryan Seratt: And can you talk a little bit about the efficiencies that you’ve been able to gain with using uPerform®?

Nicholas Edwards: Oh, absolutely. For starters, we saved over 17,000 hours as we worked with our 314e partners to convert our instructor-led training to computer-based training. That is, it would have taken us around 29,000 hours as opposed to 12,000 hours to complete the conversion work with another tool like Captivate or Camtasia. Also, since the tool is easy to use, we were able to incorporate our credential trainers and other SMEs into the work. In short, we were able to effectively crowdsource our instructor led training conversion project. That left us with a large body of trainers who were now familiar with the tool and we haven’t left that large body of trainers sit idle for long at all. They immediately went to work creating tip sheets, training materials for Epic quarterly bundles, special updates, and other support materials. In addition, they are providing more At-the-Elbow support, one-on-one virtual support, and performing all kinds of other support activities.

Click here to read Part 3.