Federal agencies have been ambitiously pursuing a digital agenda for several years now, working hard to meet federal mandates and modernize their records management to make greater use of digital technology. Along the way, they have faced numerous challenges.
One of those has simply been people. Getting skeptical team members to adopt and follow new processes in the creation, use, storage, and management of electronic format records can itself be an uphill battle. Why is that, and what can you do about it?
To answer these questions, we can glean some hints from another industry that’s gone through a similar government-led digitization effort: healthcare.
Starting in 2009 with the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) and the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) EHR Incentive Program used a combination of penalties and incentives over a period of years to get hospitals and health systems to adopt Electronic Health Record platforms in place of paper-based systems. Sometimes called Meaningful Use, this program ran into its share of roadblocks and setbacks, including opposition from the people who were supposed to use these new EHR systems.
One issue: the new EHR systems reduced productivity, at least at first.
The problem is that the new technology represented a completely different way of handling patient records, and it took time to deploy, learn, and ramp up. That incurred an upfront productivity cost. “Our productivity went down 25 percent,” one doctor told Governing.com.
There’s a lesson here: manage expectations. It just takes time to get a new technology going. In the interim, productivity expectations may have to be adjusted, and/or the resources provided to workers increased to help them learn and adopt the new system.
What’s interesting here, though, is that the technology held the potential to increase productivity over the long-term. For physicians, EHR systems would potentially make them more effective at billing and managing patients. The productivity costs were only short-term in nature, but that was still enough to generate resistance.
There’s another lesson here too: leaders need to make sure workers understand the long-term value of the shift to digital formats. There’s a steep hill to climb in the beginning, but ultimately it has the power to make their daily work so much easier and faster.
Another issue: many EHRs weren’t user-friendly.
Most EHR’s were built to facilitate billing, so they weren’t necessarily patient- or doctor-centered, at least in their early iterations. That made them harder to learn and use. As a result, many physicians opted to keep using paper records for as long as paper was easier.
User experience is pivotal into increasing adoption over time. Federal agencies can learn a lesson in this experience too: choose your Electronic Records Management system and vendor carefully. Finding a well-designed electronic records management system can do a lot to encourage faster adoption among the workforce, versus one that forces users to work counterintuitively or struggle to complete tasks. At the same time, a good vendor can significantly streamline and facilitate the deployment, onboarding, training, and user adoption processes.
About PSL
PSL is a global outsource provider whose mission is to provide solutions that facilitate the movement of business-critical information between and among government agencies, business enterprises, and their partners. For more information, please visit or email info@penielsolutions.com.