Patient care and medical technology are constantly changing and evolving. Given this, the availability of ongoing learning and training for employees is essential for any type of healthcare organization. This is especially true today as the risks of not providing essential and ongoing training for your healthcare staff continue to increase. In recent years, as regulations have become more stringent and healthcare organizations have relied on a growing number of technologies, data breaches have impacted millions of individuals, the need for preparing for healthcare data security threats has become more urgent than ever. At the same time, ongoing training is a critical component in ensuring your staff is up-to-date on the latest methods and procedures for providing the highest level of patient care.
The Benefits of eLearning for Healthcare Employees
eLearning refers to the use of electronic technologies (the Internet, primarily) for delivering all types of learning and training programs. In recent years, eLearning-based training has emerged as a preferred approach for healthcare employee training for several reasons.
Cost-Effective
eLearning eliminates many of the high costs associated with in-person, classroom-based training, such as travel, on-site instructor fees, catering, and the printing and distribution of training materials.
Convenient and Flexible
eLearning also removes the costs associated with pulling healthcare workers away from their job duties as it allows them to conduct their training activities at any time and from any place that is convenient for them.
Rapid Deployment
In contrast to classroom-based training, eLearning minimizes the time associated with preparing and delivering training materials and courses. This is especially important for the delivery of urgent and time-sensitive training materials.
Self-Paced
For employees, one of the challenges of classroom-based training is in the need to keep up with the pace set by the instructor. eLearning eliminates this challenge by allowing healthcare employees to learn at their own pace and review important pieces of content multiple times before moving on to the next section of the course.
Tracking and Accountability
For administrators, a challenge associated with classroom-based training is in the need to capture and share important data regarding employee participation and success in your training programs. eLearning streamlines the collection and distribution of this data through the availability of powerful online tracking and reporting tools.
Learning Management Systems for Healthcare Employee Training
The core technology that supports all types of eLearning programs, including healthcare employee training is a Learning Management System, or “LMS”. An LMS is the application that is used to build, deliver, manage, and track your eLearning-based healthcare employee training programs.
While some healthcare organizations choose to deploy an LMS on their own servers (self-hosted), more and more organizations are choosing instead to work with a third-party vendor in order to access LMS features and capacity through cloud-based delivery. This approach eliminates the need for a large capital investment in hardware, software, and supporting infrastructure. It also shifts the responsibility for the ongoing management and maintenance of the LMS to the third-party provider, thus freeing up your staff to focus on the delivery of high-quality training programs.
Some of the primary features healthcare organizations look for when evaluating learning management systems include:
Rapid eLearning Authoring
Historically, eLearning course development has been an expensive task, requiring highly trained (and pricey) workers to design and develop eLearning programs. Some of the learning management systems on the market today eliminate this requirement by including simplified course development tools that allow most any employee to quickly build and deliver high quality training courses.
User Onboarding
The best learning management systems include robust tools for bringing your employees onto your eLearning portal and into the specific courses that are relevant to them, given their department or job role.
Learner Collaboration
Another powerful feature offered by many learning management systems is in allowing your staff to communicate as they work through their learning materials. This opportunity for support and collaboration among colleagues supports and enhances the eLearning experience.
Gamification and Awards
Employees tend to gain inspiration for their training tasks when awards and recognition are at stake. Given this, many learning management system now embed certificates and include gamification elements to encourage training participation and success.
Analytics
Because proper training can be a requirement in healthcare (HIPAA training, for example) the inclusion of robust tools for data capture and reporting can be extremely valuable in a learning management system.
LMS Portals: A Learning Management System for Healthcare Employee Training
LMS Portals provides our healthcare clients and partners with a cloud-based, multi-tenant learning management system that allows you to launch and manage private eLearning environments for each of your training audiences. Using our platform, you can launch a branded eLearning portal for each of your various training segments, such as clinicians, administrators, partners, and more. And each portal you launch includes robust tools for rapid course development, user onboarding, learner collaboration, analytics, and more.
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