Inefficient product documentation led to loss of productivity

The Issue: 

At a behavioral health company I worked at, the company was using an Electronic Health Record software system to keep track of patient records, notes, billing, appointments, medications, etc. This product was a highly-modified version that was coded specifically to meet the needs of this business. However, as is sometimes the case in computer programming jobs, there was no documentation on the exact changes that were made once the original programmers left the project. The end result was that the company had a modified software that the standard help documentation did not work for, and no one really understood how things worked within the platform. The resulted in a lot of incorrect guess work by employees, increases in Quality control problems, increases in billing problems, and a decrease in productivity as employees tried to muddle their way through the program.

The Solution: 

I spent a week with 3 computers on my desk. I systematically viewed all of the screens and functions in the system, made a single change to the settings on the second machine, refreshed the view on the first machine and hunted down exactly what changed within the program, which I documented on the third computer. I repeated this process for every single setting and option within the program. This part of the process took me 3 days. Once I had that information I was able to build out a custom help and reference manual that was specific and unique to our version of the program, which was then easy to update and maintain going forward.

Just having this reference document alone reduced QA errors, reduced billing errors, and increased productivity. However, I also built out a library of quick-reference materials that we hosted on the company’s internal file sharing platform and we included the most common and most challenging elements of the system in our new hire training which really helped the new hires understand and master the program.

The Results:

The company had 800 clinical workers, with an average wage of $16/hr. This change saved them an average of 5 hours per employee per week,  resulting in an efficiency savings of approximately $3,328,000 in the first year.