5 Ways to improve staff satisfaction and retention

While EHR technology has evolved to give patients and caregivers more of a consumer experience, it’s also time to give clinical staff the digital tools they need to do their jobs more efficiently and to bring more joy into the important work they do. Post-acute providers that choose a more progressive EHR will find that it not only boosts productivity, but also increases staff retention.

Here are five ways your EHR can help improve staff satisfaction and reduce turnover:

1. Make technology easy to use. While many EHRs require the use of laptops or phones to document care, choosing technology that simplifies clinicians’ everyday jobs will not only increase productivity, but will also boost satisfaction. The large nature of laptops can be difficult to handle from home to home, they take time to reboot, and battery issues are common. Phones, while often sounding ideal to organizations, lead to frustration due to documenting on a small screen. Both options also create barriers between clinicians and those they serve, with patients potentially feeling like more attention is focused on technology versus their care.

With a tablet, clinicians can easily move from home to home and document at the bedside. Built-in logic provides skip patterns that eliminate unnecessary documentation and reduce redundant charting—ultimately allowing for more focus on the patient and less time staring at a screen. The ability to also document at the point of care without connectivity gives clinicians a reliable EHR that can show them patient history even while disconnected.

2. Make compliance easily achievable. Compliance is important for many reasons—one of which is that reimbursement gets delayed for incomplete or incorrect documentation. That’s a big deal for organizations trying to grow their businesses and retain more clinicians. To avoid this, your EHR technology should provide guidance for staff such as the inability to submit HIS or OASIS assessments to CMS if required fields are not filled correctly or left blank.

EHR technology built for compliance also leaves room for critical thinking among staff who are otherwise trained to jump through the same hoops with each patient. When clinicians have the freedom to document uniquely for each care journey—while also being guided toward compliance—they’ll find more satisfaction in their roles.

3. Make staff feel supported. When clinical staff are onboarded, go beyond the basic training for technology and patient care. By creating a community around your clinicians, they will feel supported and truly love what they do. Throw an office potluck for new hires to meet the team and assign them mentors so they have guidance in their new role.

Tracking productivity and late paperwork allows employers to identify staff who are having challenges, investigate why, and offer extra support and training to eliminate issues before they cause frustration to the point of quitting. To help ensure they have a positive working experience, make sure staff have reliable methods to communicate with other staff, patients, and partners, provide 24/7 access to on-demand training materials, and create a community for staff to engage with other users of the product.

4. Make work-life balance a reality. While many clinicians initially think documenting at the bedside will be burdensome, the opposite is true. When EHRs are capable of capturing documentation during the home visit via tablet, it involves the patient, improves accuracy, and cuts down documentation time in the evening.

Additionally, integrations like MatrixCare Link allow clinicians to engage patients and caregivers between visits. Secure messaging capabilities, video chat, and electronic forms give staff the ability to address concerns before they become serious problems—cutting down on after-hours communication.

5. Make a progressive EHR choice. Choosing a progressive EHR should prioritize direct secure messaging with CCDAs and eReferrals that collect patient data and auto-populate demographics, medications, etc. This helps staff save time, gather more reliable information, and exchange patient records—ultimately eliminating the black hole of post-acute care, where referral sources lose visibility of their patient and clinicians lack information about past providers.

Connection to nationwide networks and frameworks such as CommonWell or Carequality give organizations the interoperability they need to avoid these black holes of care. Integrations with partners for pharmacy medications, ePrescribe, speech-to-text, remote patient monitoring, messaging, and more can also improve rehospitalization rates.

With staff satisfaction comes staff retention, so it’s time to break the nationwide clinician shortage with innovative technology that makes jobs easier and more enjoyable. Schedule a demo to see how MatrixCare can help your organization prioritize staff happiness and start increasing your retention rates.