Stair: Welcome back to The Epic Guys training series. Stu, we’ve made it to our third destination, the islands. It’s great to be here. The clear water, the blue sky, the golden sand and, uh, your hat.
Stu: I personalized this hat just for me. What do you think?
Stair: Yeah, yeah, okay. Speaking of personalized, do you realize that today’s topic is by far the most important part of Epic training? It will make or break you if you’re not ready. So hopefully everybody will listen closely and not be too distracted by your hat.
Stu: I love this hat, but if you guys are going to get distracted, that’s fine. Today we’re talking about personalized user settings, and this will take place during your classroom training, so you don’t have to come back for another session. And remember, if you test out of training, you are still required to show up to these user settings labs. So, Stephen, what does it mean to personalize Epic?
Stair: Yeah, you know, the way I think about it, Stu, it’s like your phone, right? You get a new smartphone, it comes with all the factory settings, but nobody ever uses it that way. You put in your own backgrounds, your own apps, and your own icons, and you set up your email and voicemail – you get it just like you like it. Epic is the same way. It’s important to make it more efficient by personalizing the way you use it, so that you can be ready to see patients.
Stu: And that totally makes sense. Epic has shown that providers are more than twice as likely to be satisfied with their EHR when they personalize their user settings. It takes a little bit of time upfront, but it’s 100% worth it when you are trying to find something that you need.
Stair: So, Stu, what are these mysterious user settings we’re talking about? Is it the colors and fonts and the way things look?
Stu: Oh, no, it’s a lot more than that. You can clearly change the look and feel of your Epic with different themes, which is kind of cool. But where it really matters on day one is your common orders like labs, imaging, ultrasounds, and referrals. When you have these at your fingertips, you save a ton of time not having to search for them. It takes about 10-15 minutes to go through your specialty catalog and save your favorite orders to your preference list. And don’t forget about your preferred inpatient order sets for common admission diagnoses as well.
Stair: And Stu, providers are going to love order panels. These are sets of labs, imaging studies, and medications that you might commonly order together on a patient, like lipids and liver function tests, thyroid studies, or an anemia profile. You can order these all with one click if you have them in a panel. Pretty cool. And what’s even nicer is that all these favorites can be shared. So, if one person in the department creates them, the whole clinic group can use them without having to each make one from scratch.
Stu: Note templates are a big part of user settings as well. You won’t need many at first, but you’ll want to have them ready when you start doing your documentation. We would suggest an initial and follow-up note for inpatient and outpatient telehealth visits and whatever other visit types you might need.
Stair: Stu, smart phrases are something we’ve talked about in a previous episode, and they are awesome. These are short dot phrases that open paragraphs of narrative that you use regularly. Imagine not having to type your risks and benefits or patient instruction paragraph – just using a dot with a few letters to document these. You’ll definitely want to set these up beforehand, so you can save a ton of time.
Stu: One of my favorite things about Epic is the mobile app called Haiku for the phone and Canto for the iPad. You can do a lot of the stuff on your smartphone that you can do on the desktop, including orders, notes, and prescriptions for patients. This is also where you’ll receive secure messages and critical results, and you can even take secure patient pictures that immediately go to their chart. You’ll want to take some time in the user settings class to configure Haiku the way you want it as well.
Stair: Well, we hope you can see the benefits of taking the time to make Epic your own with the orders and templates you need the most. Just an hour or two in the user settings lab will save you a ton of time down the road.
Stu: And hey, maybe you’ll give us enough time to hit the beach.
Stair: Hey, you sold me. Let’s go!
