Milwaukee’s Marquette College of Nursing announced this week that it has begun training nursing students in electronic medical record documentation using Epic’s Lyceum platform, an educational version of its EHR.
WHY IT MATTERS
Previously, Marquette’s nursing students could only use portions of Epic’s software during their hospital training and did not have access to the full EHR until they passed their licensing exams and became nurses.
“The fact that we can offer our students experience with industry-standard software from a leading health technology company is a game changer for our university,” said Dr. Jill Guttormson, dean of the College of Nursing, in last week’s announcement.
Graduate nurses “well prepared for practice” require the skilled and ethical use of medical records, according to Guttormson.
“Working with Epic, our students can enter their clinical sites and first nursing jobs equipped to use an EHR for documentation and insight into their patient’s journey, while remaining focused on providing holistic care.”
Lyceum comes with training resources, such as sample workflows, to help Marquette professors integrate Epic into their curriculum, as well as support from Epic, the nursing school said.
“Nurses need to document vital signs, incident reports and progress notes – you have all the documentation from physicians or other healthcare providers; it can be very complicated,” Alicia Davis, a clinical instructor at the College of Nursing, told me. Marquette today.
The article says the nursing school is the first in the country to have students use the Lyceum.
Epic also offers a “Lyceum Behind the Scenes” course to familiarize teachers with the platform and tools.
“I could actually pull out an Epic map and show my students what they will see, what they will ultimately map and document in a hospital,” says Davis, whose students in the field of quality and safety in nursing will be among the first at Marquette to have access to the Lyceum, explained.
Within the educational EHR platform, teachers can add a medical records component to their lessons. Students attend the Lyceum to correctly complete patient documentation corresponding to certain patient scenarios presented in their classes.
About 20% of nurses leave the profession within the first year after graduation, Davis noted. The goal of the university’s partnership with Epic is to incorporate Lyceum into every level and program in the nursing curriculum and provide early exposure, the story said.
“We are working this into our curriculum in a very intentional way,” said Anne Costello, director of the university’s Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare Center for Clinical Simulation.
“We are working with a vendor that most of our students will see when they graduate.”
In addition to working with Epic’s Lyceum for EHR documentation training, Marquette’s nursing students will have access to immersive virtual reality training tools and a larger simulation lab opening in 2024.
THE BIG TREND
During the pandemic, nurses’ satisfaction with their EHRs declined.
Based on results from a 2022 survey of nearly 16,000 nurses across 35 healthcare organizations, KLAS Research’s Arch Collaborative offered data and best practices for engaging nurses in EHR management in its 2022 Nursing Guidebook.
“Many would benefit from a reevaluation of how their training and education programs prepare nurses for their daily EHR use, while also weathering the inevitable EHR and related environmental changes,” KLAS researchers said.
More than a decade ago, as healthcare providers were incentivized and required to make meaningful use of electronic health record technologies, the Alliance for Clinical Education found that most medical school programs then provided little EHR training for future physicians.
Today, the industry is learning that nurses’ input in improving EHR workflows is critical to the overall functioning of the healthcare system.
Denver Health’s nurses achieved major efficiency gains when the health system brought together a group of primary care physicians and nurse informatics specialists into a working group that collaborated with the EHR analysts to make changes to reduce documentation burnout and improve performance.
Amy Fielding, RN-BC, RN informatics specialist, shared Healthcare IT news in September, Denver Health found that it reduced the time nurses had to spend on documentation and saw an improvement of almost 10%.
Redesigning the Epic EHR workflow increased nurses’ documentation speed by more than 10 minutes and reduced their overall time spent in the EHR – while Denver Health reportedly saw a 9.4% increase in on-time documentation.
“It was critical that end users were able to identify documentation pain points within the EHR,” she added.
“This helped participants gain a sense of ownership in the process and ensured nurses were heard by IT at the bedside.”
ON THE RECORD
“Our goal in creating Lyceum is to simplify access to the EHR experience for future healthcare professionals,” Seth Howard, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, said in a statement.
Andrea Fox is editor-in-chief of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.