ACS Acquisition Illustrates Value Of Training Methodology

ACS, a Xerox company, has a lot of expertise in the consulting, design and implementation of EMR solutions for health-care customers. But what ACS -- and a lot of VARs -- didn't do was make sure the individual nurses and doctors understand and use the system to create the productivity gains it promises.

It was a big gap in its health-care offerings that ACS believes it filled this week with the acquisition of The Breakaway Group, which offers EMR application training to end users in a format that reinforces the content long after the system is in place, said Chad Harris, group president of ACS's healthcare provider solutions. Offering training to users in smaller, more regular increments, often less than 30 minutes, through a cloud-based model has been found more effective than taking employees out of work to train them on systems before they are implemented, Harris said.

"Those systems in the end are only as good as they should be if they are run like a utility and are scalable, dependable, cost-effective. What happens [with EMR} is the same as what happened in the late 1990s when ERP was all the rage. Those businesses got to the point where it was difficult to swallow that investment," he said.

In addition we have an outsourcing biz make sure those systems run like a utility in a cost-effective way.

"The thing that's missing in health-care reform, in our opinion, is you have to adopt those systems. This is a service offered as a SaaS model, where we can walk through a hospital and point where we're blueprinting and creating a roadmap and bring in The Breakaway Group adoption service," he said.

The Breakaway Group's PromisePoint solution creates simulations of EMR systems for every employee's role in an organization because each employee has different requirements, Harris said. ACS believes it can cut adoption time of EMR applications by up to 70 percent, he said.

"It is different at Hospital A than Hospital B. The implementation of a system is different for critical care nurses than emergency nurses than physicians. How you use the system for each function, each department is different," he said. "You can't effectively drive adoption to a system if you can't simulate that. It allows us to quickly create a workflow for a hospital and translate that into a simulator-based training environment."

That model of training drives higher levels of adoption, which allows hospitals and other health-care organizations to derive a higher velocity and higher quality set of data, Harris said.

"We are tracking in the data from simulators where people struggle going through the actual application. For example, you might have a high fail rate when trying to search for a patient in the admission office on the third screen of the patient accounting system," Harris said. "We can feed that info back to the hospital or to our own consulting line of business or back to the actual application vendors and know we need change that screen or that workflow. You can ultimately improve the adoption experience in the hospital."

Next: Metrics Show Marked Improvement

Breakaway's system measures the users' ability to complete tasks in the application, through the simulators, to determine the proficiency of every user in the organization, according to ACS.

According to its own data base, 45 percent of users had a good or excellent level of knowledge of the EMR application using the traditional training approach, while 82 percent had a good or excellent level of knowledge when the system went live using Breakaway's methodology, according to ACS. In addition, 95 percent of users had a good or excellent knowledge of the system three months after going live.

Prior to acquiring The Breakaway Group, ACS relied on its consultants training users in the traditional model, with hospitals often flying end users to sessions and creating backlogs of work for their employees upon return.

"Our consulting arm putting systems in could recognize a material difference in how end users would respond to implementations we were doing. It intrigues us as a different model," Harris said. "It created big backlogs of work and it was very pricey to schedule who would go to training at what point and what systems were they going to be ready to be trained on. It created a real struggle from the implementation side."

Meanwhile, Increasingly, ACS would run across hospitals utilizing The Breakaway Group and found a synergy between the two companies, he said.

"This is an absolute way to change that and change the outcome of putting one of these systems in. In the end we can tie a whole bunch of data together that we know will drive incredible results," Harris said.