The Marquette College of Nursing in Milwaukee announced this week that it has started to train nursing students in electronic health record documentation using Epic’s Lyceum platform, an educational version of its EHR.

WHY IT MATTERS

Previously, Marquette's nursing students were only able to use parts of Epic’s software in their hospital training. They could not access the full EHR until they passed their licensure exams and became nurses.

"Being able to offer our students experience on industry-standard software from a leading health technology company is a game-changer for our college," Dr. Jill Guttormson, dean of the College of Nursing, said in last week's announcement. 

Graduating nurses "who are well-prepared for practice," require the knowledge of skilled and ethical use of medical records, according to Guttormson.

"Working with Epic allows our students to enter their clinical sites and first nursing jobs equipped to use an EHR for documentation and understanding their patient’s trajectory while remaining focused on providing holistic care."

Lyceum comes with training resources, such as sample workflows, to help Marquette's professors integrate Epic into their curriculum, as well as support from Epic, the nursing school said.

"Nurses have to document vital signs, incident reports, progress notes – you have all the documentation from physicians or other healthcare providers; it can be very complicated," Alicia Davis, a clinical instructor in the College of Nursing, told Marquette Today. 

The article says the nursing college is the first in the country to have students using Lyceum.

Epic also offers a "Lyceum Behind the Scenes" class to familiarize faculty with the platform and resources.

"I could actually pull up an Epic chart and show my students what they will see, what they will end up charting and documenting in a hospital," Davis explained. Students in her quality and safety in nursing course will be among the first at Marquette to have access to Lyceum.

Within the educational EHR platform, faculty members can add a health-records component to their classes. Students go into Lyceum to correctly fill out patient documentation corresponding to particular patient scenarios presented in their classes. 

About 20% of nurses leave the profession in their first year after graduation, Davis noted. The goal of the university's collaboration with Epic is to incorporate Lyceum into every level and program in the nursing curriculum and provide early exposure, according to the story.

"We’re working this into our curriculum in a very deliberate way," Anne Costello, director of the college’s Wheaton Franciscan Healthcare Center for Clinical Simulation, said. 

"We’re working with a vendor that most of our students are going to 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 LARGER TREND

During the pandemic, nurses' satisfaction with their EHRs trended down. 

Based on the results of 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 on EHR mastery in its Nursing Guidebook 2022. 

"Many would benefit from re-evaluating how their training and education programs prepare nurses for their day-to-day EHR use while also weathering inevitable EHR and related environmental changes," KLAS researchers said.

More than a decade ago, when healthcare providers were incentivized and required to make meaningful use of electronic patient record technologies, the Alliance for Clinical Education found that most medical school programs then provided little EHR training to future doctors.

Today, the industry is learning that having nurses' input on improving EHR workflows is critical to overall health system operations.

Denver Health's nurses gained big efficiencies when the health system assembled a group of frontline clinicians and nursing informatics specialists as a working group that partnered with its EHR analysts to make changes in order to alleviate documentation burnout and improve performance.

Amy Fielding, RN-BC, an RN informatics specialist, told Healthcare IT News in September that Denver Health decreased the time nurses needed to spend on documentation and saw a nearly 10% improvement. 

Redesigning the Epic EHR workflow increased nurses' documentation speeds by more than 10 minutes and decreased their overall time spent in the EHR – while Denver Health reportedly saw a 9.4% increase in timely documentation.

"It was critical to have end users identify documentation pain points within the EHR," she added.

"This helped the participants have a sense of ownership in the process and ensured that bedside nurses were heard by IT." 

ON THE RECORD

"Our goal in creating Lyceum is to simplify access to the EHR experience for future healthcare professionals,” said Seth Howard, Epic’s senior vice president of research and development, in a statement.

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.