Cost Effective Staffing for an EHR Implementation.

This case study explores costs of electronic health record (EHR) implementation with the nursing super-user role in a metropolitan, not-for-profit health care system. Tapping the local pool of unemployed newly graduated nurses as half the required super-user workforce leveraged the technology skills of novice registered nurses (RNs) as trainers of experienced nurses in five hospitals. The novel workforce migrated from hospital to hospital, thereby reducing the number of experienced nurses reassigned to super-user duties in each hospital. This strategy reduced the amount of contract labor required to backfill nurse super-users' clinical shifts. Employment of the recently graduated nurses as RN residents upon completion of the EHR implementation enabled the organization to augment its clinical workforce with expert users of its EHR. The proposed innovative model increases super-users, minimizes disruption of core staffing, and dramatically reduces expense.