Going Beyond Your KLAS Measurement: Turn EHR Experience Data into Actionable IT Conversations

By Ryan Oliver, SVP of Healthcare Solutions at Goliath Technologies

Looking at the Clinician EHR Experience 2025: State of the Industry, I wanted to reflect on their key takeaways and compare them to what we’re seeing at Goliath, where we focus deeply on EHR performance.

I may be a little biased having worked at KLAS for nearly a decade, but they do an excellent job of collecting, analyzing, and understanding human experience data to help health systems improve. Over 45% of health systems have measured clinician EHR experience through the KLAS Arch Collaborative, and many have made improvements. Notable recent gains highlighted in this report include improved user interfaces, reduced documentation time, and more collaborative, secure messaging. It’s refreshing to see this progress.

It’s no surprise, however, to see KLAS state that EHR response time remains a major challenge. They also point out that most healthcare leaders do not even realize many of their clinicians struggle with slow EHR response times.

Now, in Phase 2, we focus on the next critical step recommended by KLAS: performing a comprehensive root cause analysis (RCA). While proactive monitoring tells you that something is wrong, RCA helps you understand why, so you can fix the issue at its source and prevent it from recurring.

Traditional RCA efforts can be manual, slow, and incomplete. Goliath changes that by automating the process with embedded intelligence, delivering precise insights into performance disruptions across the entire IT stack. In this article, we’ll walk through three best practices to fully operationalize RCA using Goliath.

The reason some areas improve while others remain problematic likely lies in the nature of human experience data. A clinician can describe why they need more training and even tell you the specific training needed. They can also tell you exactly why they have alert fatigue or what an ideal workflow should look like. As a result, this data is actionable, and we continue to see progress in those areas.

While this human experience data has been incredibly valuable, it does have its limitations. When it comes to EHR response time, it can indicate that a problem exists, but it can’t tell you how widespread it is, or why it’s happening.

You’ll never hear a clinician say they’re experiencing slowness because there are too many clients on a server, or that there needs to be more network bandwidth allocation to their location given the application they are using. You won’t see a physician launching a session and saying, “Oops, looks like we’re having another issue with the Citrix server”, or “Let’s get that SQL database issue fixed so I can log in and help this patient”. These are technical problems that require technical solutions.

When a health system deploys Goliath’s technology, they gain immediate visibility into user experience data for 100% of their clinicians. This is data they’ve never had access to before. While the specific findings may vary, one thing is always consistent: new, actionable insights are always uncovered. Sometimes the problem is far more widespread than originally thought; other times, it’s more isolated than expected. But in every case, the data is actionable.

I remember one case where a health system spent months trying to address relentless complaints from physicians, only to discover the issue was limited to a small group of loud, but very influential, orthopedic surgeons (who would’ve thought orthopedic surgeons had complaints?). Goliath revealed that the problem stemmed from network issues at a single location. A simple fix to a problem that had previously been difficult to isolate.

In another case, a health system believed the problem was confined to a small group of physicians that had been logging complaint tickets. But after deploying Goliath, they realized they had thousands of clinicians suffering in silence. Although many had stopped complaining, there is no doubt those issues were impacting efficiency, patient care, and contributing to burnout.

You can get actionable data through human interaction and self-reporting, but not when it comes to solving technical issues. These require data that goes beyond what clinicians can tell you.

We’re looking forward to another great year supporting Arch Collaborative members and other health systems.

As a KLAS Arch Collaborative member, we provide clinician experience data that complements your Arch Collaborative insights by showing what all of your clinicians are experiencing in terms of EHR speed and reliability.

Reach out to me if you would like to connect:

• Email – Ryan.Oliver@GoliathTechnologies.com
• LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryan-oliver-1b7478141/