Two prestigious visitors from an international benchmarking company visited the Royal Lancaster Infirmary (RLI) on Wednesday 1 May to help improve the user experience of staff on the electronic patient record.
KLAS is a worldwide electronic patient record (EPR) benchmarking company, who are supporting University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (UHMBT) to improve the EPR experience for its doctors, nurses and Allied Health Professionals.
Jeremy Goff, Senior Researcher, and Professor Rachel Dunscombe, UK KLAS Ambassador, met with Dr Paul Smith and the Health Informatics team to learn about how they were working with clinician users to improve clinical care through better use of digital technology and the EPR.
They then took a tour of the site’s clinical areas, including the Emergency Department and Acute Medical Unit where they spoke to clinicians, nurses and junior doctors about their experience of the system, before meeting up with the team and David Wilkinson, Director of People and Organisational Development, to share highlights from their research.
Colin Brown, Chief Clinical Officer, UHMBT, said: “We were delighted to welcome Jeremy and Professor Dunscombe to the Trust, to showcase what we have done so far.
“It is important to us to improve user experience of the EPR and we are working with the feedback we have had from staff and also the experience and learnings and advice from KLAS, to make user experience even better for them.”
To finish the visit, the pair shared their most recent insights of user experience measurements from some on the 200 trusts and organisations they work with around the world.
The Trust’s Health Informatics Team sent out a KLAS survey in October 2018 to ask users what they thought of the current Lorenzo EPR experience. The Trust’s junior doctors have also collated some useful feedback in recent months. These two sources of feedback have prompted setting up of an EPR User Experience Working Group and an active project, to improve user experience of the EPR.
The Health Informatics team will work fairly rapidly across the sites over the following months, to fix any broken computer kits and upgrade machines to ensure the EPR system runs as smoothly as possible. They will also look at coaching and upskilling the workforce to be able to use the EPR system better – this will include flexible workplace-based training. They will also work with the partner supplier DXC, to prioritise further key software improvements, to meet the needs of users.
David Wilkinson, Director of People and Organisational Development, UHMBT, said: “Working with KLAS is really useful – the insights from their research will help us to improve how colleagues use digital technology across UHMBT, which has been identified as a high priority area for our colleague experience strategy.”