The purpose of this program evaluation is to evaluate the usability and return on investment of an electronic medical record training conversion from an instructor-led format to eLearning for onboarding, inpatient nurses.
In recent times, policies stemming from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 have served as a stimulus for health care organizations to adopt an electronic medical record (EMR). As a result, nurses are now more knowledgeable and experienced with an EMR. In August 2016, our facility converted from ILT to electronic learning (eLearning) for inpatient nurse EMR training in hopes of capitalizing on prior Epic experience. However, a complete program evaluation of this transition had yet to be conducted. The purpose of this study is to evaluate eLearning usability (effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction) and the return on investment (ROI) of an EMR training conversion. Evaluations of EMR eLearning training were collected from 75 newly hired, inpatient nurses from November and December 2017 and compared with our ILT program. Results showed that users found it effective and were satisfied with this training method. The eLearning had superior efficiency, by reducing training time by ~50% compared with ILT, while proving to yield effectiveness and satisfaction. The return on investment (ROI) was $18,540, with a gain of 593.25 hours in nursing time. These results support the organizational decision to convert to eLearning, further supporting the conversion for other clinical roles. This project was in partial fulfillment for the degree Doctor of Nursing Practice for the author.