The software is installed. The vendor has closed the ticket. Staff have completed the introductory training session, and the system is technically live. And yet, three weeks later, the front desk is still running a paper log alongside the new tool. Schedulers are copying information from one screen into another. Someone has built a workaround spreadsheet that four people are now quietly depending on.
This is where Jeremy Fairbanks spends a lot of his time: not at the point of purchase, but in the weeks and months after the purchase, when the real picture of what a technology change actually did to daily work finally becomes visible. Fairbanks is the founder of Clearpath Health Consulting, a Nashville-based practice that works with independent clinic groups, rural care cooperatives, and specialty outpatient facilities across the mid-South. He’s a Tennessee-based healthcare consultant who has seen enough post-rollout situations to know that installation day and adoption day are rarely the same thing.
The question a clinic should be asking after a technology rollout isn’t whether the system is running. It’s whether the system is actually helping staff complete the work it was purchased to support.
Going Back to the Original Purpose
Every administrative tool is introduced with a specific job in mind. Maybe it was meant to reduce time spent on prior authorizations. Maybe it was supposed to close the gap between what the front desk captures and what the billing team ever sees. Maybe the goal was faster scheduling without double-booking errors.
After rollout, the first step is returning to that original purpose and asking honestly whether the tool is serving it. That sounds straightforward. In practice, it’s easy to skip, because by the time a system is live, everyone has moved on to the next operational pressure. The vendor is satisfied. Leadership has checked the box. But the original problem may still exist, in a slightly different form, underneath the new software.
Jeremy Fairbanks Tennessee clients often describe a version of the same discovery: the new system handles part of the intended task, but not all of it, and nobody officially owns the part it doesn’t handle. The workaround that fills that gap tends to grow quietly, built by whoever noticed the gap first, and passed along informally until it’s treated as standard practice.
Collecting staff observations early, before those workarounds calcify, is what makes a post-rollout review useful. The people who know where the tool is falling short are the people using it every day. A brief, structured way for them to report difficulties, whether that’s a short form, a standing check-in, or a designated point of contact, gives leadership real information to work with instead of waiting until a problem becomes large enough to surface on its own.
Three Places the Difficulty Might Be Coming From
When staff are struggling with a new system, the instinct is often to call it a training problem. That’s sometimes right. But training gaps, process issues, and product limitations are three different things, and they call for three different responses. Treating them as interchangeable wastes time and frequently makes the underlying problem worse.
A training gap means the tool can do what’s needed, but the staff member hasn’t yet learned how. More practice, better documentation, or a one-on-one session with a knowledgeable colleague will usually resolve it. These are real, but they’re also the most solvable category. The risk is assuming every difficulty is a training gap and layering more instruction on top of a problem that actually lives somewhere else.
A process issue means the workflow around the tool was never properly adapted to account for how the tool works. As a hypothetical example: a clinic introduces a new patient check-in system, but the intake form questions don’t match the fields in the system, so staff are translating answers by hand at every encounter. No amount of software training fixes that. The process around the tool needs to change.
A product limitation means the tool genuinely cannot do what the clinic expected it to do, at least not without significant configuration or add-on capability. This is the hardest finding to deliver, because the purchase is already made. But identifying it clearly is still more useful than continuing to assume the problem is staff error. A clinic that knows it has a product limitation can make an informed decision about how to address it. A clinic that misdiagnoses a product limitation as a training gap keeps running the same training sessions and wondering why nothing improves.
The three categories worth examining in any post-rollout review:
- Training gaps: staff haven’t yet learned what the tool can do
- Process issues: the workflow around the tool wasn’t redesigned to fit how the tool actually works
- Product limitations: the tool cannot perform the intended task without significant adjustment
Getting to the right category quickly is what determines whether the response actually helps.
What Staff Need to Know Right Now, and What Can Wait
One of the most reliable ways to slow down technology adoption is to train staff on everything at once. A system that handles scheduling, billing integration, patient communications, and reporting doesn’t need to be mastered in its entirety during the first two weeks. But clinics often attempt exactly that, and the result is that staff feel overwhelmed rather than capable, and retreat to whatever familiar method they were using before.
Fairbanks has observed that the pressure on staff during a technology change is often underestimated by the people who selected the tool. The decision-makers have been living with the concept for months. Staff encounter the reality of it on day one. “What I’ve learned,” he has explained, “is to be ruthless about what’s actually required now versus what can wait.” The same discipline he applies to his own workload, avoiding overcommitment and recognizing when a scope is growing beyond what can be done well, applies directly to how he thinks about managing staff through a technology change.
Clarifying the immediate learning requirement, the handful of tasks staff genuinely need to perform correctly from the start, gives people something achievable to work toward. Everything else can be introduced in stages, once the core tasks are running reliably.
A post-rollout review checklist worth working through in the first 30 to 60 days:
- Return to the original purpose: is the tool serving the specific task it was purchased to address?
- Identify remaining workarounds and ask what they reveal about gaps in the tool or the process
- Separate training gaps, process issues, and product limitations before deciding on a response
- Define what staff need to learn immediately versus what can be introduced later
- Establish a clear way for staff to report difficulties, with a named person receiving that information
- Set a date to review what the reports show before assuming another purchase is the answer
The Workaround Is the Message
A workaround is not just an inconvenience. It’s information. When staff build a parallel process alongside a new system, they’re communicating something specific about where the system isn’t meeting the work. The question is whether anyone is listening.
Jeremy Fairbanks Tennessee facilities that conduct real post-rollout reviews tend to find that workarounds cluster around the same two or three gaps. That clustering matters. It means the problem isn’t idiosyncratic, and it’s not random. It points to something structural: a field that doesn’t capture the right data, a step the system skips, a process that was never redesigned to match the new tool.
Those gaps are fixable, but only if they’re named. And they can only be named if staff have a clear, low-friction way to report them without fear that raising a difficulty will be interpreted as resistance to the new system. That distinction, between identifying a legitimate gap and resisting change, is worth making explicit to staff from the beginning.
For Jeremy Fairbanks, a Tennessee-based healthcare consultant, the underlying principle is consistent across different facilities and different tools. Understand the remaining difficulty before assuming another purchase is the answer. The next system won’t perform better than the current one if the clinic hasn’t yet understood why the current one is falling short.
Frequently Asked Questions
What should a clinic review after introducing new administrative software?
Start with the original purpose of the tool and ask whether it’s actually serving that task in daily practice. Then collect staff observations about where difficulties remain, identify whether those difficulties reflect training gaps, process issues, or product limitations, and establish a clear channel for staff to report problems on an ongoing basis.
How can a clinic tell the difference between a training issue and a product limitation?
A training issue resolves when staff receive more practice or clearer instruction. A product limitation persists regardless of how much training is provided, because the tool genuinely cannot perform the expected task. If the same difficulty reappears after multiple training sessions, the problem likely lives in the process design or the product, not the staff.
Why do workarounds matter in a post-rollout review?
Workarounds reveal where the official system isn’t meeting the actual work. When staff build parallel processes alongside a new tool, they’re pointing to specific gaps in capability or workflow design. Identifying where those workarounds cluster tells a clinic far more about what needs to change than a review of the system in isolation.