Your most skilled, reliable interdisciplinary team (IDT) is pushing back on the new care management platform you just invested six figures in. Meanwhile, your weaker performers seem fine with it. If this sounds backwards, you’re not alone, but you’re probably misdiagnosing the problem.
Here’s what’s actually happening: Your best IDT members have spent years developing efficient workflows that keep residents safe and comfortable. They know Mrs. Chen needs her pillows adjusted at exactly 2:15 PM to prevent aspiration during her afternoon medications. They’ve memorized which residents become agitated with certain approaches and have built trust through consistency.
Now you’re asking them to add four minutes of documentation to each resident interaction. Those four minutes mean they can’t check on Mr. Rodriguez before his late afternoon sundowning begins. The technology isn’t making their work easier; it’s preventing them from doing the job well.
Your underperformers, by contrast, don’t have these refined systems to disrupt. They’re not resisting because they have less to lose.
A brief history of broken promises: When you rolled out the last technology initiative, you promised it would reduce documentation time by 30%. It didn’t. The vendor demo showed seamless workflows. Reality delivered frozen tablets, duplicate entries, and a system that couldn’t handle the actual complexity of post-acute care. Your frontline staff remembers. They also remember that nobody asked them what problems actually needed solving before the purchase order was signed.
Consider three scenarios that happen every day in your facility:
Scenario one. Your new wound care documentation system demands a photograph, measurements in three dimensions, detailed tissue assessment, and exudate description before it will let your wound care nurse move to the next field. Meanwhile, the resident is lying in an uncomfortable position, increasingly agitated. A good team member knows this resident needs to be repositioned within the next 90 seconds or they’ll spend the next hour trying to calm them. The system requires 3-4 minutes minimum. What gets sacrificed? Usually the documentation gets rushed, creating the exact quality problem the system was meant to solve.
Scenario two. Your medication order management platform doesn’t talk to your care planning software, which doesn’t integrate with your nursing assessment tool. Your nurse must enter the same pain score in three different places. Discrepancies are discovered during an audit review – pain level documented as 7/10 in one system, 6/10 in another, 8/10 in a third. They get written up for inconsistent documentation. They were accurate in the moment. Your integration failure created their compliance problem.
Scenario three. Your best team members have extraordinary situational awareness. They notice the subtle change in gait that precedes a fall, the slight confusion that signals a UTI, the mood shift that indicates pain. This awareness requires cognitive presence. But your interface requires seven clicks to log vitals that used to take two. Every poorly designed screen is stealing their attention from residents and redirecting it to navigation. You haven’t automated the work; you’ve added a second job.
Most healthcare technology is designed to capture billable services and satisfy compliance audits. These are legitimate needs, but they’re administrative needs. Your operation is evaluated on resident outcomes and family satisfaction. When your technology demands they document a five-minute task that took two minutes to complete, you’ve created a system that actively works against their performance metrics.
What your team won’t tell you in the staff meetings:
They won’t say that the new system is increasing fall risks because they’re looking at screens instead of residents during transfers.
They won’t tell you they’re clocking out and finishing documentation at home because they refuse to leave residents waiting.
They won’t admit they’re developing workarounds that completely defeat your compliance objectives.
They won’t say these things because they’ve learned that raising concerns gets them labeled as resistant to change. So, they’ll smile in training, comply minimally, and start looking at job postings from your competitors.
Let’s talk about what actually needs to happen.
Stop buying technology for the C-suite presentation. Your vendors will show you dashboards with beautiful analytics. Ask instead: “Will this make my 3-to-11 shift team members more effective in the moment of care?” If the answer is anything other than an immediate yes, walk away.
Involve frontline staff before the RFP, not after implementation and not a token representative. Bring in your most experienced IDT members and listen when they tell you why the workflow won’t work. They see things your consultant doesn’t.
Measure what matters. If your new system increases documentation accuracy by 40% but your voluntary turnover goes up 15%, you didn’t improve operations, you optimized the wrong metric.
Build in redundancy, not just efficiency. Healthcare isn’t manufacturing. The most dangerous phrase in post-acute care is “if we eliminate this redundant step.” Your clinical team’s “inefficient” habit of double-checking the med cart isn’t waste, it’s the reason you haven’t had a sentinel event.
Accept that good technology should be invisible. Your team shouldn’t be “good at using the system.” The system should disappear into their workflow so completely that they barely think about it. If using your technology requires training beyond a single shift, it’s poorly designed for healthcare.
The question isn’t why your team doesn’t want your new technology. It’s why you’re implementing technology they don’t want.
You have frontline staff with years of expertise in the actual work of care delivery. They can tell you exactly what would make them more effective. But most post-acute organizations make technology decisions in boardrooms and ask frontline staff to adapt, rather than building technology around how care actually happens.
Your best team members don’t resist change. They resist changes that make their job harder and more time consuming. Start designing for their excellence instead of around their compliance, and you’ll stop losing your strongest performers to competitors who still let them focus on residents.
We’d love to show you the difference that thoughtful design and fair pricing can make.
Schedule a 15-minute call today