Cerner’s first EHR product used at-the-time a fairly revolutionary database strategy, a relational database. Many types of clinical employees within a hospital need the same core information, however, the way they access this information and the context of the information is rarely the same. Using a relational database, Cerner was able to connect users to the information they needed much more quickly without the inefficiencies of duplicated information. Nurses could now see what medications are ordered to dispense them to the patients, while doctors look at what medications are ordered to determine what medication they need to add to the current medications being administered to achieve the desired effect; If a doctor changed an order ahead of it being dispensed the nurse could view the change in information in their own context, in real time.

We can apply the obvious benefits of a relational database to our educational content in Associate Learning. We all work for Cerner, a Fortune 100 multinational company. We all go through compass, we all work towards the systemic improvement of health care, and we all try to embody the 7 Cerner values. Even though we all follow the same structure, we all work in vastly different organizations in vastly different ways. Why should we take the time to implement a content management strategy on top of all the time we take to create the content itself?

Your Investment

In Associate Learning we often see a variety of project scope with projects as short as a few hours up to projects that take over a year. No matter the length of the project, we put forth our best effort to deliver quality content that improves our work force. There is little more gratifying than stellar reviews from associates who have taken our learning, but if I were to choose one thing that is, it would be stellar reviews from people who stumbled across something I’ve put together randomly.

When I spend time on a project that I feel could be valuable to more than just a target audience of assigned learning, an early consideration I have is how I will be able to store the information in a way that is user-centered, searchable, and able to be held in a single location. Taking these into account, I have seen resources created over a year ago being used by new organizations and have received emails from associates thanking me for the resources that have helped them.

User-Centric – You’ve built your content, and know it inside and out; however your users don’t have the same familiarity. Taking the time to put yourself in their shoes and understanding how the might use the resource is well worthwhile. It will help to build resources that are user-friendly and valued by the users.

Searchable – Once you understand your users, you will have b etter insight into why they are looking for your resource(s). Build your page title and descriptions based on the keywords that people are most likely to be using when searching for your content. From time to time I have even used text the same color as the background hidden at the end of a document to try to catch search phrases.

What’s the point in spending your time on something that no one can find and use?

Held in One Location – We all hate to bounce through multiple pages looking for something, but it is important to consider that “in one location” doesn’t mean that it is all on one page, part of a 1999 link farm, or hidden in a locked down wiki/uCern group. It needs to be accessible by all associates who would benefit from using it.

Duplicate Materials are Inefficient

I’m not referring to just having to update 1 slide in a PowerPoint held in three different locations, but again trying to view the situation from and end-user perspective. Think about the last problem you had difficulty solving, why was it so frustrating? When I am trying to solve a problem the most frustrating things aren’t when I can’t find an answer, but when I can’t find the right answer. Often times misinformation is much more damaging than no information. It can give your users a false sense of confidence when they may have been looking at something out-of-date and incorrect. This could not only lead to performance issues, but also could have deeper-reaching compliance impacts.



When I am searching for information, typically there is at least one other person out there having the same problem I am. This means that there are often quite a few resources I wind up pouring my time into comparing this answer v.s. that answer, trying to determine which is most recent, and reading through a page only to realize they never found an answer. Sometimes I have given up along the way, and sometimes I’ve taken even longer to create my own work around. When our associates have to decide between which resource is the source of truth, they a wasting time but also losing confidence in our ability to provide them with the correct information.

The same thought process applies to our Instructional Designers. “Why reinvent the wheel?” As much as I hate to make something I know has been made before, sometimes I have to because I can’t find a previous resource. When we organize our materials to be user-centric and searchable, there is a strong chance that the same benefits will be realized by our co-workers. A strong content management strategy will help to keep us from trying to make the determination of will it be quicker to find content v.s. making it.

​Learning is Personal

No two learners are the same. Your interests and skills differ from your fellow associates, as well as the way you learn and process thought. As we continue to move away from the classroom, it becomes ever more important to focus on the needs of our learners. On one hand, we might see two similar roles needing to extract different information from the same source; however, on the other hand we might see learners consuming information in a different path than another. This is the arena in which a small bit of research into User Experience can aid us as Instructional Designers. We are lucky in that we are able to pilot our work before a mass release for free, and this is the best time to do usability testing with your materials. Don’t just focus on the quality of the content, but on the usability of it. When in doubt test it out! Below I will discuss a strategy I have implemented with our Demonstration organization in which I have worked to tie in various principles of a User-Centric Experience to their onboarding program.

​Demonstrating Success



The Essentials

The core requirements driving this onboarding program was that it was meant to support a number of solution focuses while providing a baseline level of information on some solutions, and minimizing duplicate information.

The Right Information

The first daunting task to figure out was how to get 7-12 levels of information (one for each “track” of focus) per solution without duplicating any content. I was looking at roughly 50 unique information needs, and my head was spinning. Surely no one needs to know more about a solution than those whose core focus it is, right? After some deliberation and information mapping we decided to house all the information a Demonstration associate is reasonably expected to know about their core solution on one page; our source of truth. We then identified learning objectives for each track to pull from the page of information, and created track specific pages to house the learning objectives for each solution. What resulted was one page per solution, and one page per track. The track page was the source of truth for the associate to get their prescribed learning objectives, and the solution page to pull their learning from. This not only resulted in a single source of information, but made sure that the information viewed by each track was correct. We also have seen an added bonus of curious associates learning more about pieces of a solution that interested them than their role would normally allow with a limited information scope.

User-Centered

After piloting this program, the feedback showed that I had overlooked a big headache in my usability: We ask them to refer to our solution list and playbooks which are apart from the track-based page structure more often than the ‘first’ contact with this page, which left our users having to fumble through multiple pages to find the links they needed. We added a unified page structure to add familiarity across all pages, and then added icon-based links to each page to quickly let the users transition from one page structure to another. The result was feedback showing the page was very easy to navigate compared to before.

Searchable

I determined a page naming convention early in this project and made sure that the pages could quickly be found by key word via uCern search. The naming structure being consistently applied on all pages helped the users to identify where they were in the grand scheme of the information, but also to quickly search for similar content. I interviewed my SME relentlessly regarding how people typically attempt to find information and worked to foster what they already do in our page search with the goal of not changing the way a population searches. The resulting feedback has been very strong with the ease of searchability, and especially when clients are expecting answers, this is important.

The Result

Since this program has launched, it has seen extremely high confidence and quality ratings which speak to the work put into the user experience. However, the results that were very shocking were these:

Time to Competency: We saw an average time to competency drop from approximately 1 year to 5 months. This is roughly equivalent to $50,000 in savings to unproductive time per new hire .

. Demonstration Staff on Site: Associates getting exposed to more information about the solutions than previously (via expanding the information they are able to easily receive while maintaining context), we are seeing a drop in the number of demonstration staff required per demonstration. Our demonstration staff is unbillable, like us Instructional Designers, the less number of staff required on one project increases the amount of simultaneous projects that can be worked on.

Conclusion

The time spent developing the content management strategy to a new onboarding program in this case was roughly 2.5 weeks. This lead to strategies on how to turn 50 unique information needs into roughly 16 pages. Showing the associates information that they needed along side more contextual information has not only reduced maintenance, but has increased the amount of information our associates are learning about each solution. This focus on user-centric training, among many other benefits, has led to roughly $50,000 in savings of unproductive time per associate. The savings from one associate has more than paid for the amount of time spent focusing on content management, and is a savings that comes with every new hire.

For any questions about this post or this training program please email Nate.Scarritt@cerner.com