An Electronic Medical Record Training Conversion for Onboarding Inpatient Nurses

Area of Science:

• Healthcare Informatics
• Nursing Education
• Health Services Research

Background:

• Healthcare organizations increasingly adopt electronic medical records (EMR) due to policy incentives.
• Nurses possess growing familiarity with EMR systems.
• A facility transitioned inpatient nurse EMR training from instructor-led to electronic learning in 2016.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the usability of electronic learning for EMR training.
• To determine the return on investment (ROI) of transitioning to electronic learning for EMR training.

Main Methods:

• Collected evaluations from 75 newly hired inpatient nurses in November-December 2017.
• Compared electronic learning outcomes to the previous instructor-led EMR training program.

Main Results:

• Nurses found the electronic learning method effective and were satisfied with the training.
• Electronic learning demonstrated superior efficiency, reducing training time by approximately 50%.
• The study yielded a ROI of $18,540 and a gain of 593.25 nursing hours over two months.

Conclusions:

• The findings support the organizational decision to adopt electronic learning for EMR training.
• Electronic learning is a viable and beneficial training method for nurses.
• The success of this EMR training conversion suggests potential for other clinical roles.