For health systems looking to fulfill Epic® Honor Roll program requirements, the education team at UCHealth shares some helpful tips. UCHealth, an innovative, non-profit health system based in Colorado, has been participating in Epic Honor Roll since 2017. UCHealth continually looks for ways to improve and optimize their organization’s Epic training program to meet Honor Roll requirements each year.
As part of a new Honor Roll requirement in 2023, UCHealth had to find a way to track and ensure that they offered “3-5 hours of ongoing training to the majority of nurses” in the past year.
In this Becker’s Healthcare podcast, uPerform’s Liz Griffith sits down with Reece, systems architect at UCHealth and Bonnie Adrian, clinical informatics research nurse scientist at UCHealth. The three discuss how UCHealth is partnering with uPerform to measure its ongoing nurse education, including tracking nurse engagement with training resources. These joint efforts helped UCHealth meet 2023 Epic Honor Roll requirements and deliver a better learning experience for nurses with a just-in-time, scalable approach to training.
What is Epic Honor Roll?
Epic launched The Epic Honor Roll Good Maintenance Grant Program in 2017 to incentivize health systems to maintain their Epic systems investments. It’s a voluntary recognition program based on strategies, lessons learned and best practices from Epic’s experience in healthcare.
Epic Honor Roll provides financial incentives in the form of grants to eligible health organizations. Grants can amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for a system. For eligibility, organizations must meet specific criteria across Epic’s eight components:
- Ease of Use for Providers
- Enterprise Data and Analytics
- Financial
- Health Information Exchange
- Infrastructure
- Patient Experience
- Population Health
- Staying Current
The program is designed to help systems make the most of their Epic investment, improving things like patient care, provider efficiency and clinician satisfaction with Epic.
Delivering & tracking ongoing training
One of the newest requirements under the “ease of use for providers” component of Epic Honor Roll is to have 3-5 hours of ongoing training available for nurses for Epic. For UCHealth, this meant finding a way to track engagement with their self-directed training that they deliver with uPerform.
“Using uPerform, we can figure out every piece of content a nurse has had access to, but also every piece of content a nurse has accessed. And for a lot of content, how much time they have spent in it.”– Reece, Systems Architect at UCHealth.
UCHealth is seeing improvements throughout the organizations since partnering with uPerform. Creating content is efficient, accessing content is easy (especially for Community Connect partners) and the learning experience is consistent for everyone.
uPerform’s analytics help the UCHealth team find what learning materials are most effective and allows them to meet the evolving requirements of Epic Honor Roll.
“The more we drive into Epic, the more we’re going to see learners use and benefit from it,” says Reece. And she has the data to back it. In February 2024, UCHealth caregivers accessed uPerform content 67,000 times.
The future of training at UCHealth
As UCHealth looks at what’s ahead for their training program, it’s all about optimization and creating a more seamless experience for end users. Embedding that content deeper into the workflow is a part of that process.
“The end user doesn’t want to be asked to read a tip sheet a week before an upgrade happens or an optimization happens. They want to wait to learn about the new workflow or their workflow changes when they are actually doing that workflow…Inevitably, tip sheets are necessary. And we can now put a link in the flow sheets to take you out to that reference guide or tip sheet.” — Bonnie Adrian
While the partnership with uPerform has been helpful, much of UCHealth’s success comes from cross-team collaboration and improving internal processes. For instance, Project Joy, a multi-year project focused on optimizing nurse documentation, has drastically reduced the time nurses spend on documentation.
As UCHealth continues to work toward optimizing the end user experience, the collaboration continues. Reece notes how colleagues across the organization are approaching her team to figure out how they can leverage uPerform for their learning content.
For UCHealth, success is a combination of encouraging collaboration and leveraging technology while keeping the end user experience top of mind.
Deliver and track Epic training with uPerform
Looking to level up your Epic training and benefit from the Epic Honor Roll program? uPerform allows you to create, deliver and track self-directed learning opportunities in a variety of formats. Offer your clinicians virtual training courses or embed microlearning content directly in Epic. Meet your users where they are and track their progress with uPerform for Epic.
