Your EHR training strategy may be costing you more than you think. Here’s how to measure, and maximize, your return on investment.

Ask a CIO what their EHR costs, and they’ll give you a number down to the dollar: license fees, implementation, support contracts, all accounted for in a budget line. Ask that same CIO what training is costing them, and the answer often gets murkier, not because the number doesn’t matter, but because training costs rarely live in one place. They’re split across facilities, travel and expenses, and staffing budgets, so the full total can stay hidden until it resurfaces somewhere else: clinicians entering help desk queues with “how to” questions, adoption of strategic technology that takes months longer than it should, or an onboarding time allocation number nobody’s connected back to the classroom.

That’s the real financial risk in EHR training: not that it costs too much, but that its cost, and its return, are largely invisible. Health systems often treat it as a necessary cost of doing business, rather than the value driver it can be when delivered effectively. But the health systems that treat EHR training like an investment in their most precious resources (i.e., clinicians and the systems they use every day) are driving more value than most budgets reflect.

The cost of getting it wrong

Training gets budgeted as a line item and then quietly reclassified as overhead. But the actual costs, and opportunity costs, can be surprising. The upfront costs are fairly obvious but may be hard to calculate:

• Training space, whether it’s a physical classroom or computer lab block-booked for weeks around a go-live, or a recurring block of virtual session time tying up everyone’s calendar for the same stretch
• Travel and lodging for staff who have to be physically present, or, for virtual instructor-led sessions, the trainer hours needed to run the same live content repeatedly across shifts, sites, and time zones
• Time in training and time waiting for a session to open up, a cost that doesn’t disappear just because the classroom moved online. None of it shows up as a single ‘training’ line item.

What’s worse, many of the downstream costs of insufficient training aren’t so obvious, making them even harder to track. A rising help desk queue is usually the first visible sign, but the ticket itself is the least expensive part of the equation. The real cost is the clinician time sitting behind it: every minute spent struggling in a workflow, pausing to ask a colleague, or using workarounds doesn’t show up on an invoice, but it adds up across thousands of clinicians and shifts. That inefficiency also slows time to proficiency, which means more time away from patient care, and it’s tied to lower trust in IT and higher turnover risk, arguably the most expensive line item a health system has, and one of the hardest to reverse once it sets in. A 2019 study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine estimated the annual cost of physician burnout in the U.S. at $4.6 billion.

The value of getting it right

The organizations that have invested in their EHR training programs aren’t estimating the payoff. They’re measuring it, and the results have been independently validated rather than self-reported.

UCHealth, a 37,000-employee health system spanning 15 hospitals across Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming, transitioned all 32,000 of its Epic users to asynchronous training. The result? $3 million saved annually and 200,000 clinician training hours returned to patient care every year. Nurse onboarding time dropped 50% and nurse trust in IT rose 37%, placing UCHealth in the upper 10% of all KLAS Arch Collaborative respondents.

“How we’re delivering learning to our clinicians and making sure they get the information and help when they need it is a game changer for UCHealth,” says Kelley Williamson, Director of IT at UCHealth.

Fairview Health Services has seen similar success. At the 2025 Arch Collaborative Learning Summit, Derek Harley, Learning Experience Design Leader at Fairview Health Services shared: “So now we’re [training] faster. We’re getting people on the floor faster. It’s saving money. So, now we can invest in people’s career-long journeys.” After switching to asynchronous education, Fairview now saves $2 million annually and cut content creation time by 76% against the industry benchmark.

Derek adds, “I’ve never seen top percentiles in my overall Net EHR Experience Score, but when we look at deeply engaged end users, this is what happens — it’s incredible.” Fairview’s data backs him up: Clinicians using integrated learning resources scored 19 points higher on the Net EHR Experience Score than their peers.

Fairview and UCHealth aren’t outliers. Emplify Health converted unused classroom space into self-paced learning labs and transitioned trainers to one-on-one coaches. “We found a great deal of efficiency with folks, because instead of having 15 trainers in 10 computer labs, we instead could have 2 or 3 trainers in different computer labs with many roles in those rooms taking the courses,” says Bethany Poellinger, Senior Instructional Designer at Emplify Health. Oy Apotti Ab, a public-sector health system in Finland, eliminated €193,000 a year in just training classroom rentals. The system saved another €480,000 by retiring its legacy LMS licensing.

KLAS Research’s 2026 ROI Validations and Arch Collaborative case studies independently confirmed that these are measurable, replicable returns not isolated to these systems. When organizations treat EHR training as an investment and optimize their training strategy, they can realize significant savings in both upfront and downstream costs.

What to measure

Most of these outcomes trace back to the same starting point: establishing a baseline early and tracking outcomes across the full lifecycle, not just at go-live. The organizations seeing the strongest returns aren’t just tracking savings. They’re watching three outcomes: how much time and capacity training frees up, how clinicians feel about the technology and the people supporting it, and what all of that is worth financially. They also track the leading indicators that signal how training is performing before the dollar figure catches up:

• Trust in IT
• Workflow adoption
• Time to proficiency
• KLAS Net EHR Experience Score (NEES) and training satisfaction
• Help desk volume

None of those indicators mean anything without a baseline in place before the transformation starts, which is why the return stays invisible until someone goes looking for it.

What this is worth to your organization

The organizations above didn’t start with a perfect training program. They started by asking what theirs was actually costing them, and what it could return instead. If you’re not sure what that number looks like for your organization, it’s a conversation worth having, and it’s worth knowing who you’d be having it with. uPerform was named 2026 Best in KLAS for Training and Learning Platforms based on direct feedback from healthcare organizations leveraging it to drive meaningful change across various training outcomes.

Epic, MyChart, Care Everywhere, and Healthy Planet are trademarks of Epic Systems Corporation.