Effective E-learning for Healthcare.
Medical staff and patients can benefit from online courses.E-learning--it's the one Internet tool that will touch every industry and play a dramatic role in healthcare's future success. If your organization isn't already considering the value of online learning, now is the time to start.
Too often, healthcare organizations respond to budget woes with budget cuts, and training is one arena frequently trimmed. While such cuts may provide short-term relief, reducing the availability of training opportunities can have severe long-term consequences. E-learning, like any type of advanced training, should lead to gains in customer satisfaction, productivity and eventually, increased revenues.
The value and use of e-learning are even greater in healthcare than other businesses. The pace of change in the medical field and the ongoing education requirements for medical and clinical staff make continuous learning a necessity for healthcare organizations. And continuous learning is the essence of e-learning.
Benefits of E-learning
Healthcare organizations that employ e-learning can reap almost immediate results. Online learning provides easy access to required education through self-paced courses that are available anytime, anywhere. Also, e-learning guarantees consistency of the message--everyone in your organization gets the same information in the same way at the same time, which is crucial for compliance courses.
Training delivered via the Web can be easily updated. If you outsource your Web-based learning, you gain the added benefit of solutions that are simple, inexpensive and quick to deploy and maintain. Also, e-learning facilitates easy, accurate tracking and reporting to help you ensure that critical knowledge is reaching the right people.
Employee turnover is a major healthcare challenge, and e-learning can help alleviate it. For example, nursing staff turnover had become a $200 million problem for one of the country's largest healthcare organizations. To better attract and retain qualified nurses, the organization built Internet-based clinical courses to aid nurses in the early stages of their careers. Although the program is still in its infancy, this organization already has seen a decline in turnover rates for nursing staff.
E-learning can also influence HIPAA efforts (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996). E-learning is a cost-effective and efficient solution that can ensure awareness of the requirements among all employees. As a Web-based, outsourced solution, e-learning avoids the additional costs of distributing materials, hiring quality classroom instructors, and arranging travel logistics and meeting spaces--which can translate into savings as high as 50 percent.
Pharmaceutical sales forces can ramp up on new drugs and devices at Internet speed, putting innovative products into the hands of the medical community more quickly. E-learning can provide product training to clinical personnel or can be used to educate patients on disease states, drug compliance and wellness.
Finding the Solution
As fast as organizations see the value of e-learning, vendors enter the market to provide e-learning services. As you assess and evaluate prospective service partners, consider the components that comprise an e-learning solution: content, technology and services.
Content comes from either or both of two categories: "off-the-shelf" catalog courses or custom-developed courses for your specific needs. The technology component is comprised of a Learning Management System or LMS (for administration, tracking, and reporting), the core architecture that hosts and delivers the learning, and the Internet learning environment in which students interact with the course material, with experts and with each other. Services include performance consulting to align your learning solution with your strategic needs, and services to create and maintain your solution.
Effective e-learning is a learner-centered experience with rich content in a relevant context. Learners are active participants in the experience and interaction with experts is incorporated into the course. E-learning will not wholly replace instructor-led or hands-on training any more than instructor-led training will return as the sole method of teaching. Effective learning uses the right media for the right audience, whether that be online, a classroom course or a precept situation.
Imagine a scenario in which a nurse goes online for instruction about performing a diagnostic electrocardiogram (ECG). The nurse is tested online by being shown a diagram of a torso and then being asked to place the leads on that torso using the mouse. Once the nurse has mastered this online segment, he or she moves to the clinical environment to gain the crucial supervised practice required to successfully and safely perform the ECG. By preparing for that step in advance, the nurse gained confidence and requisite background knowledge prior to the hands-on portion of the learning, saving time with a preceptor to work toward mastery of the skill.
Future of E-learning
E-learning is being adopted rapidly in all business sectors because of its ability to deploy knowledge quickly and efficiently to a large number of dispersed people. Businesses need e-learning to survive. Over the next several years, organizations across all industries will continue to adopt e-learning as a core business function, because the knowledge worker drives today's business. Healthcare has always been a knowledge industry.
However, with the advent of e-learning there will be a shift in the way healthcare workers, and workers in general, learn. Learning will be delivered on a continual basis. Instead of taking an eight-hour classroom course, learners will receive knowledge and instruction when and where they need it, in small chunks of directed, relevant information. The focus will be on improved human performance, not on checking off a completed course title. Finally, learning will be personalized. A supervisor will be able to immediately assign learning if she sees a gap in an employee's knowledge. Similarly, an employee can track what learning he or she wants to pursue.
With e-learning in our future, the opportunities for human knowledge to expand quickly, personally and effectively are boundless.
Pete Goettner is president and CEO of DigitalThink in San Francisco, CA.
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| Title Annotation: | Industry Trend or Event |
|---|---|
| Author: | Goettner, Pete |
| Publication: | Health Management Technology |
| Geographic Code: | 1USA |
| Date: | Dec 1, 2000 |
| Words: | 955 |
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