EMR Wannabe - Part 2

TRAINING ON YOUR PARADE

Well, here comes one short thread given such an obvious commandment: thou shalt not spend more than 1 hour in EMR training: that’s 60 minutes, 3600 seconds or one episode of Criminal Minds commercial breaks included. That’s right: one episode, not the whole season.

I remember once spending 45 hours training on an EMR system - which we ended up not using since it was about as daunting as singing Gangnam Style in a Korean karaoke bar full of mocking teenagers.

45 hours in a training room? That's 45 hours taken away from my patients. Multiply that by 150$ an hour: that’s $6,750 of my time that will never get billed by the hospital. Not to mention the vendor’s training invoice, which came down to roughly $15,000 per physician. Total: $21,750 down the drain. In a new age where hospitals are trying to go LEAN, this sounds like massive waste begging to be recycled. Multiply this by 5 different systems for 5 different departments and you suddenly enter a new dimension where “broke” and “burnout” share the same dictionary entry.

I recently spoke to a couple of physicians running a GP in the UK. They couldn’t recall exactly how long they'd spent on the torture chair but what they remember perfectly is the training bill: £70,000 divided by 2 users; that's £35,000 a pop.

Morals of the story: waste starts where training fails to end. Which pushes our little commandment to get more specific:

"If over an hour thou shalt labor at more than $1,000 per user, thou shalt go back to the pit while vendors rework their price list. For thou shalt not bow down and pay for blurry guesstimates meant to compensate for shortcomings that are not thine to begin with. Thou art a care provider, not a sacrificial cash cow with a golden umbrella.”