How a Learning Management System Help Healthcare Organizations Elevate Their Corporate Training Program

The healthcare industry is truly a unique one. It is highly-regulated and extremely fast-paced due to increasing patient expectations, fast-evolving government regulations, and constant technological advances. This poses a significant challenge for healthcare organizations to meet regulatory requirements and ensure their medical professionals are delivering the most effective medical care possible for their patients with limited budgets.

Utilizing a Learning Management System (LMS) enables you to deliver efficient and engaging training to your learners in order to address and and stay on top of the above challenges.

Here are the types of training healthcare providers need to effectively deliver and how an LMS can support this: 

 

1) Compliance Training 

 

Healthcare organizations have to meet strict governmental compliance requirements and to prevent cybersecurity threats. Not doing so will increase the risk of liabilities and hefty fines so it is important for organizations to ensure their workforce are completing the required compliance training. Let’s take a closer look at the importance of healthcare and cybersecurity regulations.  

 

Cybersecurity: Healthcare organizations are a big target for cybercriminals due to the highly sensitive patient information collected by them. In 2017, the US medical and healthcare sector experienced close to 350 data breaches, exposing 4.93 million records.

 

Ongoing and new healthcare regulations: Healthcare organizations must adhere to the many industry regulations, including new standards that are created, which can be very costly and require much effort. For example, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) requires specific protocols and documentation. Not meeting their requirements can result in large fines or loss of funding.

 

Again, it is essential for the healthcare industry to adhere to these regulations to protect its employees, patients, and the organization. 

 

An LMS enables hospitals and health systems to stay on top of all these requirements through compliance features such as “automated deadline notifications”, “auto-course enrollment”, and “compliance status reports”. 

 

Solutions LMS provides: 

• Auto-Enroll Learners into Compliance Courses

Set up rules to auto-enroll your workforce into the relevant course based on their user properties such as location, completion status, title or department, training deadlines, and certificate expiration dates. Implementing these rules will drastically simplify your enrollment process, saving you immeasurable time and effort. You will also be able to ensure your learners are meeting healthcare regulations and cybersecurity requirements consistently. Here are some of the main user properties you can use to auto-enroll your learners: 

 

• • Location: Sign up users in a state-based health and safety course based on their location.
    
    
  • Completion status: Enroll an employee into a patient data privacy course once they pass a health and safety course or re-register a user back into the health and safety course if they had failed.
    
    
  • Title or department: Register an employee into a course related to the new role or department they are moving to. For example, you can sign up a user for a patient privacy course if they are transitioning to the Admin/HR department.
    
    

Training deadlines: Assign a learner to an emergency preparedness course when they are due for re-training or if their certification is about to expire.

• Schedule Reminders for Upcoming Training and Certification Deadlines
  
  

Automate alerts to help keep your learners on top of their training requirements and maintain their compliance. You have rules you can set up that triggers an automated email to be sent out to learners who did not complete a course, have training that is going to expire or are due for re-training. By setting up reminders, you make sure your workforce does not miss their training due dates. They will always remain compliant which will result in reduced risk and injuries and also the risk of getting fined. 

• Receive Compliance Performance Insights to Your Inbox 
  
  

LMS reporting allows you to generate reports on compliance status, allowing you to see who is compliant and who is not. You can have this essential data and other compliance KPIs automatically sent directly to your inbox daily, weekly, or monthly. You can also auto-schedule these reports to other members of your team. As a training manager, being equipped with this information will help you to stay on top of your employee’s compliance status. Making sure your workforce remains compliant at all times and eligible to work will result in reduced downtime in your organization.

 

2) Role Specific Training

 

 

Healthcare is a very sensitive industry. Medical professionals from nurses to physicians have to follow strict clinical operating procedures precisely or it can lead to serious consequences such as risking patient safety or hefty penalties. As a result, healthcare organizations need to deliver various types of training in an efficient and timely manner to ensure service is provided without any errors. 

 

An LMS enables hospitals and health systems to consolidate all of their training in one location that is easily accessible for their team anywhere at anytime. Courses and learning paths can be instantly assigned to learners and automated notifications on training deadlines can be set up to ensure they complete required training.

You will be able to make sure your team is adhering to all policies and procedures accurately, so you are able to provide error-free patient care and reduce the risk of liabilities. 

 

3) Ongoing Training

 

New technology and innovations are putting pressure on healthcare organizations to keep up. Not being able to stay on top of new technology and processes can lead to inefficiencies and poor medical service, so it is important to have your team adopt and embrace the new processes. Implementing the new technology can create user adoption challenges though. If users are not adequately trained on it, this can lead to employee inefficiencies and make the new system useless. 

 

With an LMS, you can automatically enroll your team into the training course based on user properties such as title or location to ensure you have the right team members registered into the relevant course. In this case for example, if your organization purchased a new medical device that is to be used by nurses in the state of Texas, you can auto-enroll all nurses in Texas to the medical device’s training course. 

 

You can also centralize your training resources and materials from how-to tutorials to product guides in a single location that can be accessed anywhere at anytime as long as there is an internet connection. Your learners will have easy and quick access to them whenever they need support. 

 

Lastly, you can create learner progress reports to see who completed their training and able to utilize the new technology. This will be very helpful in managing your resource capacity. 

 

Final thoughts:

The healthcare industry is continuously changing, and hospitals and health systems need to ensure their workforce is equipped with the knowledge and skills to stay on top of all of this. 

Utilizing a Learning Management System will help to support your medical professionals by providing them with the resources they need to meet healthcare regulations, work more efficiently, and provide the best patient care possible, which is a top priority for providers.

SkyPrep has helped many healthcare organizations such as the AGP Clinical Academy to optimize and deliver efficient training to their workforce.

Learn more on how you can elevate your corporate training with SkyPrep LMS.