A people-first change management approach turned a high-stakes communication platform switch into a model for EHR adoption

When Baptist Health Jacksonville replaced its legacy communication platform with Epic Secure Chat, the rollout wasn’t just a messaging upgrade; it changed how critical lab values were handled, how consults were routed, and how care teams found out who was on call. Get it wrong, and the ripple effects reach the bedside.

Listen to the full conversation. In this episode of the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast, Dr. Rhiannon Doherty of Baptist Health and Dr. Stephanie Lahr of uPerform discuss the change management strategy behind Baptist Health’s Epic Secure Chat rollout.

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You can’t solve a problem you haven’t fully defined. You can’t serve a user you don’t know.

Dr. Rhiannon Doherty

Director of Usability and Clinical Optimization, Baptist Health Jacksonville

Baptist Health Jacksonville’s Epic Secure Chat rollout by the numbers

As North Florida’s largest health system, Baptist Health Jacksonville serves nine counties across Florida and Georgia with more than 15,681 team members and 2,156+ physicians and APPs, the scale of users the Secure Chat transition needed to reach. When the Secure Chat Learning Pathway training site first launched, the content saw immediate traction. By July, that momentum had scaled Epic Secure Chat usage and adoption across the entire organization.

Baptist Health Jacksonville built its Secure Chat training content on uPerform Learning Pathways, which gave the team a single-source-of-truth for role-based content delivery. These role-based learning portals drove over 9,000 asynchronous self-service training engagements. Even post-go-live, learners returned to the resources multiple times. A sign, as Dr. Doherty put it, that it was “worth going back to.”

What made the rollout succeed: a fresh perspective on change management

Dr. Doherty’s approach to EHR go-lives comes from an unexpected place: her clinical background as a psychiatric nurse practitioner treating complex, unresolved adult trauma. That experience taught her that information alone doesn’t create change — people need to feel capable, in control, and connected to the process before they’ll adopt something new.

She frames this through self-determination theory: people need autonomy, competence, and connection to accept change. Miss any one of the three, and adoption stalls.

“We often approach our go-lives and implementations as knowledge deficits — that if we just give people the right tip sheet, the right website, the right email, that they’re going to have the knowledge and be ready to go when the day hits. But people need so much more to embrace change.”

Dr. Rhiannon Doherty, Director of Usability and Clinical Optimization, Baptist Health Jacksonville

The stakes of getting this wrong go beyond a single project. As Dr. Lahr noted, the same three factors are tied to clinician burnout more broadly:

“Those three elements, without them, are often what we hear about leading to burnout. It’s not just a matter of whether you get the adoption and the ROI on the technology — if that change management isn’t done appropriately, if you don’t have clinicians with autonomy, competence, and connection, that will lead to burnout, not just the failure of your project.”

Dr. Stephanie Lahr, CMO, uPerform

Why resistance to a new EHR workflow should be treated as a signal, not a setback

Resistance to a new workflow usually isn’t stubbornness. It’s a sign that something in the design, communication, or training didn’t land. Dr. Doherty’s team treated pushback as a source of data, not a problem to route around.

“Good designers, and folks in psychiatry, know that resistance is a signal. They know that’s a sign that something else is going on, either a thought process or a barrier to success somehow. And they get curious about it, rather than judging it and taking it personally.”

Dr. Rhiannon Doherty, Director of Usability and Clinical Optimization, Baptist Health Jacksonville

That mindset shaped who Baptist Health invited to the table. Rather than limiting early planning conversations to the most tech-forward staff, the team deliberately included the people most likely to push back, because their concerns tended to expose real workflow gaps before those gaps became expensive, late-stage problems.

5 change management best practices from the Baptist Health Secure Chat rollout

1. Map the workflow before touching the platform. The team started with what clinicians were actually trying to accomplish (i.e., routing a consult to the right resident or attending, finding who’s on call) instead of starting from Secure Chat’s feature list. That surfaced real functionality gaps, like changes to consult routing, early enough to fix proactively.

2. Bring every stakeholder group in at the start, not the end. Super users, the training team, clinical informaticists, and frontline clinicians were looped in well before go-live. Beyond building buy-in, this let the team catch design flaws before hours of build work went into the wrong solution, an upfront investment that avoids paying twice for rework later.

3. Consolidate training content into a single source of truth. Instead of scattering information across emails, flyers, and one-off tip sheets, the team built a uPerform Learning Pathways site organized around the questions people were actually asking, from “what even is Secure Chat?” down to detailed, role-specific workflows. Every channel, from email to a printed flyer on the wall, pointed back to that same resource.

“It has an AI-enabled search answer, so it gives them that direct-answer experience you get, like on Google.”

Dr. Rhiannon Doherty, Director of Usability and Clinical Optimization, Baptist Health Jacksonville

4. Tie the change to purpose, not just process. The team consistently connected the transition back to Baptist Health’s mission of keeping care teams and patients connected, not just “here’s a new button to click.”

5. Let engagement data drive follow-up, not guesswork. Using uPerform analytics, the team could see exactly which roles, departments, and cohorts were and weren’t engaging with the new content, and adjusted outreach accordingly instead of waiting for problems to surface on their own.

This workflow-first, people-first approach mirrors the core principles behind uPerform’s Training Transformation Playbook: meet learners where they are, consolidate fragmented resources into one trusted source, and use engagement data to close the gap between go-live and true adoption.

From compliance to ownership: what adoption looked like after go-live

The clearest sign of successful adoption wasn’t the initial usage numbers; it was what happened after. By July, Secure Chat saw roughly a million messages a month across the organization, with nursing and providers as the two largest user groups, alongside transport, patient business services, telemonitoring, and other roles making up the rest.

Just as important, Baptist Health began fielding requests to use Secure Chat for workflows the original project team never anticipated, meaning users had moved from simply complying with the new tool to actively finding new value in it.

“We’re seeing requests come in for use cases we never would have thought of. Users are confident enough in not only using the tool, but are already thinking about optimizing it for their own value.”

Dr. Rhiannon Doherty, Director of Usability and Clinical Optimization, Baptist Health Jacksonville

The takeaway for health IT and informatics leaders

The Baptist Health Epic Secure Chat rollout shows that the technical build is only half the work of a successful go live. The other half is understanding the humans on the other side of it — their workflows, their concerns, and the trust they need before they change how they work.

“You can’t solve a problem you haven’t fully defined. You can’t serve a user you don’t know.”

Dr. Rhiannon Doherty, Director of Usability and Clinical Optimization, Baptist Health Jacksonville

Listen to the full conversation, “People First: What Psychiatry Taught Me About EHR Go-Lives,” on the Becker’s Healthcare Podcast, featuring Dr. Rhiannon Doherty of Baptist Health and Dr. Stephanie Lahr of uPerform.