We can give a hungry person one fish for dinner or a fishing rod, but for them to eat regularly, we need to teach them to fish.
Educators tend to focus on mastery of a skill, rather than the psychological experience of using said skill.
When such skill development is associated with a tool, we assume that skill-set mastery leads directly to tool engagement. This assumption is reasonable, but does not necessarily happen all the time.
Similarly, we can give a hungry person one fish dinner. For them to eat regularly, however, we could give them a fishing rod to fish with. But that alone won’t suffice. We also need to teach them how to fish. Giving a person the end result or a tool without instruction does not yield a sustainable result.
This all sounds like common sense, right? Yet, this is all too often overlooked in healthcare. The Arch Collaborative Study found the best predictor of a clinician’s user experience with their agency’s Electronic Health Record (EHR–a secure lifetime record of your health history) was… training! Put differently, clinicians reported high levels of satisfaction with their EHR if they’ve received training. Predictably, low levels of satisfaction were associated with no training, and understandably, less satisfaction translates to less engagement. It’s sad to think that an agency’s investment into implementing new tools should fail to yield the promise of increased effectiveness simply because of a lack of training.
While providing implementation support to MyOutcomes’ customers, I’ve often noticed how significant a role FIT eLearning can play in producing successful implementation. Relative to agencies that don’t provide training to their providers, agencies, requiring the successful completion of training by their clinicians, show remarkably faster implementation. It is easy to understand why–they’ve been taught how to fish.
Successful implementation of new tools requires buy-in by users. Users, who find satisfaction in using the tool, are more likely to engage in its use, while those who are dissatisfied are going to resist using the tool. This, again, makes common sense: if you get a fancy new tool at work, and you have no idea how to use it, are you going to engage with it? Probably not.
If clinicians are provided training with MyOutcomes, they will see their experience of using MyOutcomes more positively. This leads to more positive experiences, which in turn means more engagement, which means successful implementation and thus, improved results across the board.