Digitizing The Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™: Your Healthcare 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 healthcare 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.

Who Is Donna Wright?

Donna Wright (MS, RN, NPD-BC) is a well-known expert in the healthcare 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 countless healthcare teams to help them find a better way forward with competency assessment and management 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 Donna Wright is modernizing competency models for healthcare 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 Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™ Revered?

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

What Are the Benefits of Digitizing Your Competency Program?

With The Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™, there’s an emphasis on creating an easier-to-manage system for your healthcare team. This is a natural fit with the idea of digitizing your program. Digital healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 healthcare 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 Donna 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 legally authorized to support The Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™. (It was actually co-designed with Donna Wright herself, so you can rest assured that the two pair seamlessly.)

Beyond competency program support, CHCI offers a comprehensive, cloud-based platform designed to support the complete employee development cycle. The Competency Suite supports initial competency through traditional orientation or TSAM®, along with ongoing competency through the Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™ or an organization’s preferred methodology. The Professional Portfolio Suite extends that support through Career Ladder, Demographic Data Collection, Peer Feedback, Mentoring, and Succession Planning. Together, these flexible tools create one connected platform designed with healthcare professionals, for healthcare 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 (both traditional and tiered)
• Ongoing competency
• The Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™ Education and Consulting
• TSAM^® Education and Consulting

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 healthcare 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.

Exclusive Access to Donna Wright Education and Consulting

All CHCI clients receive exclusive access to education and consulting for the Donna Wright Competency Assessment Model™, including the opportunity to work directly with Donna Wright herself. This expertise helps organizations move beyond simply digitizing their competency processes to successfully implementing the model’s principles of ownership, empowerment, and accountability.

Through customized guidance, education, and ongoing support, Donna and the CHCI team help organizations develop a meaningful, sustainable competency program tailored to the unique needs of their workforce. This exclusive partnership connects CHCI’s purpose-built technology with the expertise behind the model, giving clients the tools and guidance needed to achieve lasting success.

Exclusive Access to TSAM^® Education and Consulting

CHCI clients also receive exclusive access to TSAM^® education and consulting, including the opportunity to work directly with Dr. Ellen Joswiak, one of the creators of the model. This expert guidance helps organizations implement and sustain a collaborative, competency-based approach to clinical orientation that supports preceptors, new hires, and organizational leaders.

Through customized education, consulting, and ongoing support, Dr. Joswiak and the CHCI team help clients tailor TSAM^® to their unique workflows, workforce needs, and organizational goals. By combining exclusive expert guidance with our platform, CHCI provides a connected approach to creating more efficient, engaging, and effective orientation experiences.

MyCHCI’s Professional Portfolio Suite

MyCHCI offers more than healthcare competency management. The Professional Portfolio Suite supports the complete employee development cycle by bringing professional growth, achievement, and workforce planning into one cohesive, cloud-based platform. This eliminates the need for disconnected systems and gives employees, leaders, and educators greater visibility into professional development across the organization.

The suite includes customizable tools for Career Ladder, Demographic Data Collection, Peer Feedback, Mentoring, and Succession Planning. Organizations can document education, certifications, professional achievements, and other demographic data; build point- or requirement-based career advancement programs; collect meaningful feedback aligned with their professional practice model or preferred framework; coordinate mentoring relationships; and identify and prepare future leaders. Each component can be tailored to an organization’s unique goals and used independently or together as part of a connected workforce-development strategy.

Through CHCI’s partnership with Creative Health Care Management, platform clients can also extend their technology strategy with expert consulting focused on nursing excellence. CHCM’s consultants bring 75+ years of extensive experience in areas such as Magnet^®, Pathway to Excellence^®, professional governance, mentoring, and organizational culture, helping organizations connect their professional portfolio tools with meaningful, sustainable practices that strengthen engagement, advancement, and nursing excellence.

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?