Digitizing The Wright Competency Assessment Model™: Your Health Care Team’s Key to Success

Switching to The Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™ because you’re tired of using a program that feels more like a broken system than a helpful tool? As you rethink your organization’s approach, it’s key to find the right tool to support accountability in health care staff development.

The Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™ focuses on creating a program that actually serves the needs of those who do the work every day. And finding digital software that shares that same value will only make this change more effective. Below we’ll cover some highlights of The Wright Competency Assessment Model™ and the only platform in the market that’s been designed to support it, MyCHCI. In fact, this component that helps organizations seamlessly manage and track their competency needs was co-designed with Donna Wright herself.

Want to read ahead?

• Learn about The Wright Competency Assessment Model™
• See why health care professionals revere it
• Uncover the benefits of digitizing your program
• Explore your options for getting started

Who Is Donna Wright?

Wright (MS, RN, NPD-BC) is a well-known figure in the health care space, with degrees in nursing, family sociology, and adult education. On top of that, she is an award-winning author and is highly recognized for her book, The Ultimate Guide to Competency Assessment in Health Care. 

She’s worked with many health care teams to help them find a better way forward and currently works as a consultant on the Creative Health Care Management team. Her guiding principle is to create meaningful and effective programs for competency and staff development for all departments. 

The Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™  

In the past, many used a top-down approach for competency. But Wright is modernizing competency models for health care with a shift in perspective.

Wright noticed teams being inundated with generalized mandatory modules, annual training, and computer-based training. But she also saw the frustration professionals experienced because their competency programs lacked a tie-in to what they really needed to do their job each day.

She advocates for a bottom-up approach, instead of a top-down “spray and pray” method, and  her model relies on three elements she finds crucial to success:

Why Is The Wright Competency Assessment Model™ Revered?

Because of her first-hand experience, Wright understands what isn’t working in the traditional approaches to health care competency and staff development. She saw many systems were becoming too complicated and not meeting the needs of health care teams.

Her model is rooted in the goal of creating a program that’s not cumbersome or labor-intensive. And as many professionals have noted in their online reviews — her solution is practical. 

Wright has built this approach on real-world insights and examples, which is likely why so many have found it helpful. She’s even created a field guide health care teams can use to guide their efforts.

What Are the Benefits of Digitizing Your Competency Program?

With The Wright Competency Assessment Model™, there’s an emphasis on creating an easier-to-manage system for your health care team. This is a natural fit with the idea of digitizing your program. Digital health care competency assessment tools have been proven to provide several key benefits that ultimately help your team improve patient outcomes.

1) Enhanced Collaboration & Decision-Making for Your Team

One study of 10 experienced physicians over 7.5 days of clinical work found that the mean number of decisions made in a shift was 158. And while it’s hard to study and quantify this across all health care workers, it’s undeniable this profession requires a lot of decision-making in a day.

This makes it all the more critical to ensure you’ve got a competency training program that equips your teams properly for those moments.

Centralizing data for employees, managers, educators, and other stakeholders in a digital solution makes it easy to:

• Grab individual insights to create personalized learning paths across health care teams.
• Pull real-time insights quickly for strategic decisions by your leadership team.
• Enable employees to access their personal data around their professional development.

2) Reduced Administrative Work To Save Your Team Time

A recent report from Google Cloud and The Harris Poll found that clinicians are spending about 28 hours a week on a variety of administrative tasks. And the reality is that the more time health care teams spend on administration, the less they can devote to supporting patients.

If you digitize your competency program, you can at least ensure it’s one less task contributing to that administrative burden.

Transitioning to the right health care competency assessment tool can:

• Automate data entry, scoring, and reporting.
• Reduce human error in the data entry or pulling process.
• Streamline data collection for accreditations, like Magnet® or Pathway to Excellence®.

3) Automated Accountability That Increases Employee Engagement

A 2024 study looked at the effects before and after implementing a digital competency tool, specifically measuring the satisfaction of NPD practitioners and training costs at a pediatric hospital. 

Modernizing competency models for health care with a digital tool led to $500,000 saved in training costs. But the benefits didn’t stop there. NPD practitioners’ job satisfaction scores also increased post-implementation. 

A digital solution can automate reminders and other checkpoints, as well as place some of the responsibility for competency work on the employee. That way they have flexibility and ownership in the process as well. Ultimately, this can make employees happier, but it can also free up those overseeing the competency training to focus on meaningful work they enjoy. Which in turn can lead to better job satisfaction and support retention.

Getting Started: Digital Competency Tracking Solutions

So you like The Wright Competency Assessment Model™ and see the value in digitizing it. But where do you start? Of all the digital competency tracking solutions available, Creative Health Care Insight’s (CHCI) platform MyCHCI is the only software on the market designed to support The Wright Competency Assessment Model™. (It was actually co-designed with Wright herself.)

Aside from that, MyCHCI offers more than just competency program support. It also includes a second suite that supports employee development. So you’re actually getting two tools in one, cloud-based platform — all designed with real health care professionals. 

Here are some ways it supports digitizing The Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™ and goes beyond in supporting your staff.

MyCHCI’s Competency Suite

The Competency Suite in CHCI includes support for:

• Initial competency
• Ongoing competency
• Peer feedback

Leveraging this suite can help your organization boost its retention rates, reduce inefficiencies for cost savings, and enhance safety and quality. It’s designed to provide smooth orientation, documentation, reporting, and communication among all levels of your teams. Plus, its tiered orientation features adjustable educational components. 

With CHCI, you can create personalized learning for your health care team that addresses the unique needs of every individual. That way everyone is getting the training that’s most impactful for their daily responsibilities. 

Additionally, competencies can be filtered and prioritized by groups, departments, or other needs. This is useful if you’re working toward Magnet ® or Pathway to Excellence ® designation.

The peer feedback components in the 360 Discovery Tool make it easy to collect insights from individuals, peers, supervisors, and leadership, bringing together key information from all levels. 

MyCHCI’s Verification of Competency Features

Because verification is often a pain point of programs, CHCI’s tool was designed to give you better options. Verifying isn’t limited to just physical demonstrations or paper-based tests. Instead, MyCHCI offers a variety of methods to reflect the multifaceted demands of health care. This includes:

MyCHCI’s Professional Portfolio Suite

As an added bonus, you get more than just a health care competency assessment tool with MyCHCI. The second component, the Professional Portfolio Suite, helps you automate professional development tracking and gives you a cohesive, streamlined tool so you can avoid using strung-together systems.

In it, you’ll find an area to facilitate demographic data collection, making it simple to gather individual education and certification data. There’s also a customizable professional advancement, achievement, and compensation tool to help with point- and/or requirement-based programs. 

Why Choose MyCHCI to Digitize Your Competency Program?

The robust dashboards give your team real-time monitoring. It’s easy to visualize the data that matters most to you. Employees at all levels are empowered. You can customize learning in MyCHCI to ensure every nurse, every technician, and every staff member is not just competent, but excelling in their roles. It’s easier to track professional development milestones and compensation to create a happier, more engaged team.

All of these features translate into more benefits than just simplifying Competency. MyCHCI can save your team time, money, and frustration, leading to better retention rates and job satisfaction.

There are many reasons Creative Health Care Insight’s platform features stand out. Why not see some of them for yourself, firsthand?