eLearning brings a plethora of benefits and possibilities to the healthcare system. It allows companies to train medical personnel and pharma sales reps quickly and easily, and free up more time for what matters most — patient care and healthcare innovation.
Here are five use cases that explain how you can leverage eLearning in the healthcare industry — based on actual inspiring success stories.
1. Train Employees to Level-up Their Professional Skills
Medicine is constantly evolving, bringing new techniques, practices and technologies to the world. Medical staff must keep abreast of all these new innovations and findings and expand their knowledge and skills. The easiest way to train a large number of health care professionals is by implementing eLearning. This way, employees can learn on their own when they have time at home, thereby ensuring that working hours are not disrupted.
For example, Knox Community Hospital, a 99-bed community hospital in Mount Vernon, Ohio, trains its nurses, radiology technicians, medical assistants, lab personnel and patient care assistants with the help of interactive courses on different healthcare topics — from customer service to laboratory specimen labeling. Moving training online helped the company achieve great results: Employees have become much more engaged in training and now really learn the material, rather than simply looking through it, as they used to do.
2. Onboard New Employees
There’s a tremendous variety of health care organizations, from hospitals and community health centers to pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers. Many of these organizations have numerous and dispersed staff, which makes it challenging and extremely expensive to train them face to face. With eLearning technologies, they can create a unified onboarding program once and deliver it as an online course to all newcomers.
This is exactly what PSI, a clinical research organization, has done with its more than 2,300 employees around the world. Before going online, PSI had to conduct instructor-led induction sessions in 50 different locations. It was very labor-intensive, and training activities lacked consistency. So, the company revamped the induction program and repurposed it into online courses. The new onboarding program turned out to be much more engaging for employees because of its interactive format and visual appeal. And besides, with this approach, they managed to lighten subject matter experts’ workload and free their time up for other important tasks.
3. Provide Compliance Training
Health care is one of the most highly regulated industries and obliges employees to take compliance training on a regular basis to stay abreast of regulations. If medical facilities don’t ensure that all the standards are met, they can’t legally operate. Since compliance training is unavoidable, many companies are looking for ways to conduct it by investing as little time and money as possible. One such way is eLearning.
Unichem Laboratories Ltd., one of India’s biggest pharmaceutical companies, needs to ensure that all its over 3,200 employees are compliant with industry standards and regulations. Before it adopted eLearning, compliance training was performed in a classroom setting. However, this had significant disadvantages: no way to cater to different learning styles, revise the material for those who missed a class or make sure that learners are focused on the learning content — not to mention the complexity of the training itself.
eLearning helped them resolve all these issues. The company converted over 900 standard operating procedures into courses and started delivering them to employees online, thus making the training process faster and more cost-effective.
4. Train Partners and Customers
Internal teams have always been the primary use case for training, but, in the health care sector, it is sometimes no less important to train partners and customers. eLearning technologies can be extremely helpful for providing product training to distributors and end users. It’s a great way to inform them about the features of medical equipment and health devices and explain how to use them properly.
IMT Matcher — a provider of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) management technologies and quality management systems to donor banks, fertility centers and other assisted reproductive technology (ART) centers — uses eLearning to train its distributors and direct customers on how to promote and use its products in various scenarios. Switching to eLearning from classroom training helped the company save at least 25% of its training costs.
5. Deliver Accessible Training to Low-income Countries
eLearning is a great driver of medicine development in remote and low-income countries. Since online courses can be accessed in any part of the world where an internet connection is available, skilled doctors can share their expertise with colleagues from other countries.
For example, FYMCA Medical educates doctors around the world on how to diagnose rare diseases and how to treat those patients suffering from those maladies. Learners can study right on their mobile devices, even when offline. Since internet speeds can vary greatly in different parts of the world, learners can download content from the learning platform to their smartphones and view it at their convenience.
To Sum It Up
Continuous training in the health care industry is not just a “nice-to-have,” but is often compulsory. Employees cannot simply maintain their knowledge and skills — they must constantly expand and update them. eLearning is an easy, yet effective, way to cover many health care training programs. It allows healthcare organizations to enable cost-effective and compliant training for their employees, partners and customers, and helps health care workers upgrade their knowledge and skills, boost performance and improve the quality of patient care.
