Sound Shore Medical Center of Westchester, New Rochelle, N.Y., recently completed a year-long grant research project for the U.S. Department of Defense that looked at the effectiveness of two different electronic health records training approaches for nurses.

"Studying the most effective means for educating nurses on the use of electronic health records has a benefit not only for the Sound Shore Health System, but potentially for all organizations involved in EHR training," said Pam Dupuis, RN, senior vice president for patient services, in a news release. "Thanks go to Nurse Educators Sue McLeer, RN, and Camille Drago, RN, as well as Sound Shore’s Chief Information Officer, Barbara Cooke, for making this project possible."

The research was designed to determine the effectiveness of two different training approaches for teaching nurses the use of EHR. The study compared a 16-hour traditional, instructor-led classroom experience to a modified approach that retained all content of the traditional method, except it replaced two hours of the instructor-led learning with a Web-based teaching module of the same duration. Another facet of the study was whether participant characteristics, such as age and nursing and computer experience, factored into post-training outcomes.

The training approach using a Web-based training module proved to have no significant affect on training outcomes. A key finding is that nurses with higher levels of education and general computer proficiency required fewer hours of training and support to achieve proficiency with the EHR system. 

These findings suggest the use of Web-based training for some users based on an initial screening for general computer proficiency could generate cost savings as organizations transition to, or upgrade existing, EHR systems.

FOR INFORMATION about Sound Shore’s DoD EHR project, contact Nurse Educator Sue McLeer, RN, at 914-365-3532.