Slow System Response Time Hampers Clinician EHR Satisfaction

System response time is a top factor hampering clinician EHR satisfaction, according to a KLAS Arch Collaborative research report.

KLAS has used the Net EHR Experience Score (NEES) to measure clinician EHR satisfaction since 2017. KLAS calculates the score by subtracting the percentage of negative user feedback from the percent of positive user feedback.

The report found that the factors most closely associated with overall NEES are the EHR’s ability to enable efficiency and system response time. Low scores in those two areas indicate that larger barriers, like lag time or too many clicks, are stopping clinicians from leveraging health IT to its full potential, the KLAS authors noted.

Notably, some metrics generated higher clinician satisfaction than others. For instance, 75 percent of responding clinicians agreed or strongly agreed that their EHR is reliable. However, only 55 percent reported that system response time meets their expectations.

Several metrics saw low average satisfaction scores, even at organizations with high NEES. The metric with the lowest average score was integration with outside organizations, followed by an agreement that the EHR enables efficiency. For both metrics, only 56 percent of respondents with a NEES in the highest quartile reported satisfaction.

“This demonstrates that the industry is lagging far behind end users’ expectations for things like integration and efficiency,” the report authors wrote. “To raise the bar and improve clinician satisfaction, healthcare organizations will need to collaborate with their peers, learn from high-performing organizations, and work with vendors.”

KLAS recommended that EHR vendors develop connections between their systems and other platforms to improve integration. They also called on vendors to train customer organizations to utilize existing integration fully.

To improve system reliability and response time, KLAS suggested that EHR vendors communicate recommendations or best practices for how healthcare organizations should set up and use the EHR.

Additionally, they said vendors should be transparent about which technology works best with the EHR, such as single sign-on options, other software solutions, hardware, and internet options.

The report called on healthcare organizations and IT leadership to improve efficiency by simplifying charting as much as possible to remove unnecessary clicks. Further, organizations should provide workflow-specific education for clinicians to help them be more efficient.

KLAS also recommended that healthcare organizations consider the following questions to improve system reliability and response time.

1. Do we comply with our EHR vendor’s infrastructure recommendations?
2. Do we follow a hardware inventory schedule?
3. How does Wi-Fi perform in our clinics and hospitals?
4. Do our single sign-on and EHR vendors work together to improve the end-user experience?
5. Do we know how long it takes for a user to get into the EHR?
6. Do we know how long it takes to move between windows or tabs in the EHR?
7. Are we using the newest version of our vendor’s EHR?