New Orleans-based Ochsner Health has built a 70-person “sales team for tech” that helps with all things Epic and clinicians can’t do without, the health system’s CIO told Becker’s.

The 47-hospital system launched its Epic Academy in 2012 — it was then called the Physicians Academy — to help with the transition from a homegrown EHR to Epic.

“We wanted to be implementing the latest and greatest tech, and we knew we couldn’t do that without a team that was really out there to support our physicians and clinicians,” Ochsner Health CIO Amy Trainor, BSN, RN, told Becker’s.

Ms. Trainor was Epic Academy’s first employee, at a time when it had a staff of three serving just two hospitals. Launching technology is often the easy part for health systems; supporting it and ensuring its continued adoption is critical for success.

“This is really our sales team for tech,” Ms. Trainor said. “And they’re selling something no one wants: They’re selling tech, they’re selling change management, they’re selling how to use the new and improved tools that we have.”

But they turn clinicians into believers. Ochsner physicians are each assigned an Epic Academy specialist they meet with once or twice a week and can call or email at any time. If an Academy member leaves the health system, providers often ask when the position will be filled.

“It’s abnormal that frontline staff are like, ‘I need this person in my life,’” Ms. Trainor said. “They’re really supportive of the role, and that makes a huge difference for us.”

Academy specialists’ duties have pivoted to supporting emerging technologies, such as AI scribes. With that tool, Academy members go into clinics to train staff and follow up with locations where adoption hasn’t surpassed 60%. Ms. Trainor believes the team will become even more crucial as Ochsner Health expands into more ambient AI and “hospital-of-the-future” technology.

Epic Academy adds staff as the health system builds new facilities. Pay is commensurate with experience and the role (a nursing-related position, for instance, is equivalent to a nurse). For a system of Ochsner’s size, Epic Academy is a “significant expense,” Ms. Trainor said. But the return on investment is “really about the change management and the adoption and physician satisfaction.”

Ochsner also recently did a “big-bang” go-live with the Epic Beaker lab module across the system, saving $1 million on support costs by using internal team members, including Epic Academy.

Academy specialists are regionally based — from New Orleans to northern Louisiana to Mississippi — to support providers on site. They share a QR code with their designated clinician containing their contact info. They become de facto coworkers in the departments they serve; they’re in the office, at the nurses’ station.

“[Clinicians] know these people by name,” Ms. Trainor said. “It doesn’t matter if they’re like, ‘Hey, every two days this printer didn’t work.’ ‘I can’t use my phone from this room.’ Even if they can’t solve it, they will get someone to solve it. They’ll put in a ticket. We’ll get the tech team out there. The primary face of my department is these guys.”

Early on, Ms. Trainor figured out what it took to be successful in the job: responsiveness.

“And what started happening is, instead of the physicians and nurses putting in tickets and getting frustrated because they didn’t know when they were going to be resolved, if it was urgent, they would call me, and if it wasn’t urgent, they would just wait till I came by at Tuesdays at 10 to see the doctor,” she recalled.

Ms. Trainor said she’s talked about this topic more than any other in her time at Ochsner, as other health systems want to learn how they can set up similar teams. A few others have (notably, Sacramento, Calif.-based Sutter Health, which is led by some Ochsner alumni).

“It takes a lot of work and understanding to get to know how to get there, and that’s why we’re excited to share it, because we do believe it’s been a big key to our success, especially our pace, and how fast we move,” she said.

The Academy teaches courses for clinicians, such as “Epic 201” and “Amplify My Proficiency.” Specialists dig through the data to find what they call “silent strugglers” — say physicians who spend much of their days — or nights — in notes, and help them gain that time back.

Epic Academy members come from diverse professional backgrounds: from radiology tech to nursing, education to biology, billing analysts to informatics, camp counseling to meteorology. The health system focuses more on empathy, communication skills and curiosity about technology than having a tech background.

“We get an enormous amount of subjective feedback, that working at a place that is investing in making sure their physicians and nurses know how to use the technology is a big sell for them, and they tell us that they haven’t seen that at other places,” Ms. Trainor said. “So I’m really proud to work at Ochsner, where we’ve taken the time to invest in the resources needed to make this successful and scalable across the organization.”

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