Situation
A regional healthcare provider needed to replace its existing financial, supply chain, human resources, and payroll legacy applications with a new, integrated cloud-based solution to increase financial efficiency and decrease support costs. They chose Infor’s CloudSuite Healthcare solution, and Infor partnered with GP Strategies® to provide an end user adoption strategy and solution.
Technology and process optimization to improve adoption and sustainability
Challenge
With multiple IT projects going on at the same time (electronic medical records and ERP), everyone at the healthcare system was focused on the challenge of getting things done on time and within budget due to massive changes brought on by multiple, overlapping projects. Some of the challenges included:
- Lack of a clearly defined organizational change strategy and approach confused users about how to align using the new system within outdated and unclear business process procedures and policies.
- End user training traditionally had been a decentralized effort, and each business unit and location used a variety of approaches and methods.
- Since multiple IT projects were going on at the same time, internal resources were stretched thin. This caused delays while team members spent time figuring out solutions instead of supporting implementation.
- Going live with several modules at the same time prevented the team from implementing lessons learned and best practices for future phases of the project.
- Going live with electronic medical records software along with rebranding the name of the healthcare system stretched organizational resources to the point where communication degraded and deliverable deadlines were challenging.
Solution
GP Strategies performed an End User Training Analysis and planning activities. This effort established a foundation for success for the client’s training initiatives and provided an assessment of the targeted users, learning culture, existing learning practices, learning infrastructure, and impacted business processes and systems to formulate an overall End User Training (EUT) Strategy and Plan. The plan established the best approach for content design, development, and delivery and included the following deliverables:
- High-level curriculum plan
- Detailed course designs
- Training development
- Train-the-trainer delivery
The initial training scope included the following deliverables:
- ELearning courses
- Content to support multiple days of instructor-led training broken out by functionality
- Work instructions and simulations
- Hands-on exercises
- Job aids
- Coaching guides
The training team consisted of a training lead and multiple training developers who worked with subject matter experts (SMEs) on performance tasks, work instructions, and training delivery.
Consulting teams from the systems integrator, Infor, and GP Strategies were well informed about the use of Infor CloudSuite and knowledgeable about its use in the healthcare industry. They were focused on configuration, testing, and system implementation and were always open to help the training development team understand how to use the system, navigate through new transactions, identify data to validate end-to-end processes, and complete end user training content development.
Results
After the implementation and training, the healthcare provider’s financial performance improved from a significant loss two years ago to breakeven for their first fiscal year post-go live. The following year, their performance was essentially on budget and roughly $15M better than the previous year on a run rate basis.
We often hear and read about large healthcare systems whose financial performance degrades when they implement new technologies. Losses mount, blame is thrown around, and performance as well as employee morale suffers. But the healthcare provider has successfully implemented or upgraded two major technologies and simultaneously improved their financial performance significantly with our help.
The client has learned how to work differently, with a focus on outcomes and results. As importantly, GP Strategies has shown that training and end user adoption is an integral part of the project success, and that has not gone unnoticed by the client’s leadership. Here are some of the key success criteria the end user training strategy targeted:
- End user training with a blended delivery approach was established early on as a condition for project success.
- The use of an accelerated content development platform, Infor’s User Adoption Platform (UAP), supported the efficient creation of simulations and step-by-step work instructions.
- The use of a dedicated refreshable training delivery tenant for end user training with actual client data and business scenarios led to increased application adoption.
- Detailed system integration testing (SIT) and user acceptance testing (UAT) scenarios included real data to be used by end users, which accurately mirrored “day in a life” situations across the healthcare system.
- The use of clearly defined role-based curriculums helped end users understand what skills and knowledge needed to be addressed throughout training.
