Deployment of an in-house designed training process in a quaternary care hospital

Healthcare providers, such as doctors and nurses, have been famous for high resistance to change. A careful change management plan, particularly training process, is utmost necessary. A quaternary care hospital in India changed its system, from manual to Electronic Medical Record/Health Information System (EMR/HIS). The hospital management wanted to train its 4000 diverse end-users on the EMR/HIS in two months' time.

This paper describes an in-house designed training process and its deployment in the given healthcare organizational settings.

We designed a training process named DRIPDA. The training process was deployed to train 4000 end-users of EMR/HIS, in the quaternary care hospital. Various factors, such as methods and tools of training, constraints of trainees, trainers, and organization were considered while deploying the training process. The effectiveness of the DRIPDA was assessed using the Kirkpatrick model.

End-users received training on the new system only in 25% of estimated time and 28% of the projected expense, without having any distraction in their usual workflow, or any productivity loss.

We found that the DRIPDA training process could train all employees effectively and efficiently. A decent training process can help in managing the change, thereby reduce the training time and cost.