What Is Involved in EHR Training?

EHR training, or training for electronic health records, involves teaching staff how to use these new technologies to track medical history for a patient between different health care providers. This includes various general issues of end-user documentation, competent record-keeping, and consistent implementation throughout a healthcare office or facility. Many different kinds of staff may be involved in EHR trading for a medical business.

In its broadest sense, EHR training simply consists of showing each kind of medical worker how to use electronic health records practically in their clinical role. Beyond this, however, there’s also the idea of teaching staff how to implement the initial system, and how to use it to comply with standards of the medical community. One aspect of electronic health records training that may be prominent for some medical businesses is the use of electronic health records to avoid certain types of medical malpractice.

By teaching staff how to implement EHRs, the medical business may set up initial training sessions for top-level users who will in turn train others in the new technology. This type of EHR implementation training might focus on the GUI or graphical user interface for the software. This is where staff members look critically at the controls and visual presentations that will determine how their workers utilize these digital record-keeping resources.

Aside from implementation, medical offices use many different types of electronic health records training for different staff members. These can be broken down into the role that these staff members serve, from pharmacists and lab workers to technicians, as well as doctors, nurses, and even the reception and billing staff. It can also be broken down into departments, for example, where inpatient EHR training may be different than outpatient EHR training in a medical business.

Another aspect of this type of medical records training focuses on compliance with established protocols. For example, in the United States, where electronic health records are gaining a lot of ground, there’s the idea of complying with the HIPAA or health insurance portability and accountability act legislation. This legislation governs the use of patient health data and provides for secrecy of this information. Strict standards are placed on the use of either digital or paper records, where medical businesses may benefit from focusing a lot of their electronic health records training on compliance with these types of standards.