Health systems are stretched thin. Budgets are tight, turnover is high, and workflow changes arrive faster than education teams can keep up. Yet many training programs still rely on approaches built for a different era: time-intensive, expensive to maintain, and too generic to drive real adoption or efficiency.
There is a better way, and the stakes are higher than most leaders realize. In a study of more than 72,000 clinicians across 150+ health systems, less than 20% of the variation in clinician EHR experience was explained by which EHR was in use. Training quality was the single greatest predictor of satisfaction.
Training isn’t a support function. It’s a strategic lever.
What Leading Health Systems Are Seeing
Organizations rethinking their approach to EHR training are seeing measurable returns:
- UCHealth (Aurora, Colorado) saves $3 million and returns 200,000 clinician hours to the organization annually after moving to role-specific, asynchronous training.
- Fairview Health Services (Minneapolis, Minnesota) saved $2 million a year after shifting to asynchronous education, giving 24,000 clinician hours back to patient care.
- Emplify Health (Green Bay and La Crosse, Wisconsin) reduced trainer time by 43% after moving to a hybrid training model, freeing educators for one-on-one coaching and strategic projects.
Four Best Practices Behind the Results
1. Meet learners where they work
Clinicians don’t have time to leave the floor for a refresher. Bring education to the point of need with in-app guidance, embedded tip sheets, and short microlearning inside the EHR itself. When Fairview embedded a short video directly in its Epic eConsent workflow, adoption climbed from 7% to 87%.
2. Give clinicians one trusted source of truth
Training content scattered across intranets, shared drives, and email gets ignored. Consolidate it into a single, searchable repository. After Bellin Health and Gundersen Health merged to form Emplify Health, consolidating training resources drove a 333% increase in active users and an 890% increase in content engagement.
3. Make it relevant to the role
Generic content is quickly dismissed. Training tailored by role, specialty, and care setting, and tied to standard workflows, sticks. Aspirus Health (Wausau, Wisconsin) established Curriculum Review Boards to keep training aligned with standard workflows, and cut the time new nurses spend documenting in Epic by 50%. At Fairview, physicians who used role-specific content scored 19 points higher on their Net EHR Experience Score.
4. Measure what matters
Attendance and completion rates say little about impact. Track the outcomes leaders care about: time in training, EHR and after-hours (“pajama”) time, help desk volume, workflow adoption and clinician satisfaction. Fairview’s deep adopters reported 38% higher agreement that EHR support is timely and 27% higher agreement that ongoing training is sufficient.
Where to Start
Most health systems already have pieces of a modern training program in place. The challenge is knowing which gaps cost you the most and where to focus next.
uPerform’s Training Transformation Maturity Model is a one-page self-assessment that maps five levels of training maturity, from reactive to optimized, so you can pinpoint your highest-leverage next step.
Download the Training Transformation Maturity Model
Want More?
The full Training Transformation Playbook lays out a seven-step transformation model covering governance, content and delivery strategy, super user programs and measurement, drawn from uPerform’s work with health systems in the U.S. and abroad.
