If you’re looking to grow your team and improve your training processes, an elearning platform is the best way to scale your healthcare workforce...
We all know the healthcare industry is under immense pressure from all angles.
Your healthcare team is expected to embrace new technologies, hire more staff, improve processes, and keep up with ever-changing compliance processes.
All while providing the best possible care in a post-pandemic world.
With healthcare teams dealing with mass resignations and soaring rates of burnout, it’s hard to see and feel motivated about the benefits of e-learning.
It might just look like yet another standard to meet.
But we’re here to help. Because, by embracing cloud-based e-learning software, healthcare teams can:
- Scale, streamline, and optimize staff training and onboarding
- Improve knowledge retention and team engagement
- Keep on top of compliance across teams and practices
- Empower teams to take ownership of their learning
- Eliminating and automating admin tasks
By taking advantage of the advantages of e-learning systems, your healthcare team can focus on what matters most: providing the best possible patient outcomes.
So let’s get into it.
What Is Cloud-Based eLearning Software in Healthcare?
Cloud-based e-learning systems are education and training platforms that are stored virtually and can be accessed via an internet connection. When applied to the healthcare industries, cloud-based e-learning platforms give…
- Healthcare employees have the ability to access training resources, attend virtual classes, watch instructional videos, take quizzes, and receive updates on training progress online from their laptop or smartphone.
- Healthcare managers have the ability to create courses, roll out training modules, automate onboarding processes, provide lessons, and access reports all via an online platform and analytics dashboard.
Because all learning materials are stored and accessed online, healthcare teams no longer have to wade through inefficient and resource-intensive processes associated with traditional training methods.
At an organizational level, cloud-based e-learning brings huge advantages in terms of:
- Saving money
- Reallocating resources to the more valuable tasks
- Optimizing and streamlining processes
- Scaling the workforce without spreading managers too thin
- Keeping up with compliance and regulatory requirements
These benefits are huge when we think about the strain healthcare organizations are under as they try to grow to meet hiring targets while being extremely under-resourced.
But e-learning in healthcare isn’t just a method to tighten the purse strings.
Cloud-based technology also brings huge benefits to teams on the ground in wards and clinics, such as:
- Providing more engaging, cohesive, and collaborative training material
- Communicating requirements and expectations clearly and fairly across all teams
- Enabling remote access to training, so employees don’t have to travel
- Connecting national workforces, so everyone receives the same quality of training
That’s just a quick snapshot of the benefits of e-learning. Let’s take a closer look at the features of e-learning tools that enable these industry-wide advantages.
The Key Features of an eLearning System in Healthcare
The key features of an e-learning system in healthcare are certification management, reports and analytics, content authoring, mobile learning, and lesson gating.
But like any software platform, there will be a huge variance in the amount and quality of features that are offered across the market.
Let’s take a look at the e-learning software features that are most beneficial to healthcare teams – and why they’re so crucial.
|
Key Feature |
Why it Matters for Healthcare |
| Certification management | Keeping on top of compliance and regulations is difficult to manage across large teams, departments, and regions. By using one centralized e-learning system, managers can keep track of all staff certifications and are automatically alerted when a certificate expires. |
| Reports and analytics | Healthcare managers must maintain consistent staff support and training across departments. With an online dashboard that tracks and reports learner performance, managers can make informed decisions and share progress with other stakeholders. |
| Content authoring | Not all e-learning systems allow you to upload and create your own training content. But platforms like Tovuti enable healthcare teams to upload their educational resources onto the cloud and turn them into engaging, gamified, and accessible e-learning courses. |
| Mobile learning | Healthcare teams need the training to be accessible and engaging, especially as they balance shift work, travel, and social distancing due to COVID-19. Some e-learning platforms like Tovuti enable healthcare organizations to create their own branded app, making training accessible via smartphone. |
| Lesson gating | Healthcare training modules must be rolled-out in the correct order, but delays and shifts can make it difficult to keep track of where staff are at. With gated lessons available online, healthcare managers can ensure that all trainees take lessons in the right order. They can also set up compulsory tasks to be completed by learners to unlock the next stage. |
The 4 Key Benefits of an eLearning System in Healthcare
The four main benefits of an e-learning system are maintaining compliance, facilitating professional development, cutting costs and improving efficiency, and attracting top talent.
It’s a no-brainer that healthcare organizations face many different challenges, from staff shortages and burnout to managerial inefficiencies and strained resource management.
What makes those challenges difficult to manage is that they all affect each other.
If you’re short-staffed, the remaining employees are at risk of burnout. When employees are burned out, compromises have to be made on processes.
It’s a vicious cycle. But investing in robust cloud-based e-learning systems is a powerful solution to combat all of these challenges at once.
Here’s how.
1. Maintain regulatory and safety compliance
Without a cloud-based e-learning system to track and report on all your staff, keeping up with compliance is a mammoth task for healthcare managers.
Especially since the pandemic, medical policies change dramatically and regularly – and that’s before you factor in the task of managing different compliance policies between states and regions.
Aside from the managerial headache, compliance training becomes a dull and monotonous task for staff.
If healthcare organizations fail to keep up with compliance, or a jaded staff member forgets their last training course because it was too boring, you face the risk of:
- Endangering patients, and
- Facing violation fines (up to $1.5million per HIPAA incident)
But the right medical learning management system (LMS) solves this problem with the power of automation, cloud-based resource storage, and engaging e-learning resources.
Healthcare e-learning tools like Tovuti have certification management capabilities.
This enables healthcare teams to upload compliance requirements and set the conditions that must be met for learners to receive their qualifications.
Then, using in-built tests, quizzes, and modules, training can be delivered hands-off and at scale, so you can deploy and manage certification training across multiple teams at once.
Plus, using automated notifications, you’ll receive a heads-up when certifications are about to expire. This provides peace of mind to your entire team, ensures your team’s skills are always up to date, and minimizes the risks involved with lapsed certifications.
2. Facilitate professional development and support
One of the biggest challenges in healthcare is having an available skilled workforce.
And regular professional development is also fundamental to attracting and maintaining top talent within your healthcare team.
But if, like many healthcare teams, you’re battling with limited resources, providing opportunities for employees to upskill can be far down the priority list.
By investing in a robust cloud-based medical LMS, you can make sure you’re offering regular and engaging professional development and support that your staff can access:
- Remotely
- Engagingly
- In their own time
- Collaboratively
LMS systems like Tovuti offer an abundance of tools and capabilities for you to create and roll out staff training – such as quizzes, videos, virtual lessons, discussion boards, or simply a library of resources.
By having these courses available on the cloud, your staff can access them from their personal device and take advantage of professional development in their own time.
The result is that:
- Employees are more engaged and motivated, making them more resilient to burnout
- Healthcare organizations benefit from a more competent workforce
Now that’s a win-win.
3. Cut costs and improve efficiency
IBM’s online training ROI is $30 for every dollar spent.
By investing in the benefits of e-learning tools for training and onboarding processes, healthcare organizations can see similar results.
Healthcare organizations face two massive and conflicting challenges:
- Hire more skilled people
- Cut costs
The hiring, onboarding and training process is the most important part of any organization – especially healthcare.
But it’s also incredibly expensive: a recent study found that the average cost to fill a healthcare position is $41,000 and takes over 40 days.
This is where the benefits of e-learning systems in healthcare really shine.
By creating a relatively hands-off onboarding process that is engaging, automated, and accessible via the cloud, healthcare teams can effectively scale their hiring intake.
Rather than wasting precious time and resources on…
- Scheduling face-to-face meetings with new staff or trainees
- Creating and sharing separate documents with each employee
- Conducting one-on-one training sessions
…healthcare teams can digitize their onboarding process and turn it into an online course.
Once your onboarding process has been uploaded to the cloud, you can then roll it out at scale to as many trainees as you need to onboard.
Rather than individually sending, managing, and overseeing an onboarding process for each individual – which is time-consuming and inefficient – managers can keep track of everyone’s progress using their online dashboard.
With automated notifications and reporting, managers will know when a trainee is ready to proceed and can jump in when they’re ready to move on to more demanding training.
4. Attract and retain top talent
When nearly 1 in 5 healthcare workers quit their job during the pandemic, it’s clear that retaining skilled workers is crucial for the industry to recover.
These days, skilled workers are more discerning about how often and how well professional development opportunities are provided.
A LinkedIn study indicated that more than 59% of employees joined a company because of the professional development opportunities and career pathways that were offered.
So it’s clear that the way your healthcare organization communicates and implements learning opportunities is crucial to attracting and retaining staff.
Online learning tools are a powerful way to transform your organization’s environment to facilitate upskilling without draining resources.
By creating clear, measurable, and engaging learning resources that have a tangible impact on your staff’s capability and career path, your organization can turn staff training into a competitive advantage as an employer.
Rather than forcing staff to travel or shift their plans around training opportunities at other locations, offering cloud-based and mobile-responsive training modules is a game-changer.
Top talent will be attracted to the greater flexibility, engagement, and support offered by an intuitive e-learning platform that they can access without having to chase managers or travel away from their families.
The Importance of an eLearning System in Healthcare
Investing in an e-learning system is the most effective way for healthcare organizations to manage industry pressures, grow a skilled workforce, and deliver better patient outcomes.
The pandemic had a severe impact on all industries, especially healthcare.
While most industries have embraced technological innovations to bolster their processes, healthcare organizations are still dealing with the post-pandemic hangover of:
- Being understaffed
- Having limited budgets
- Facing high staff turnover
Now more than ever, it’s crucial for healthcare organizations to use cloud-based systems because it’s the most effective solution to all of these challenges.
Because, while sheer resilience and hard work have taken the healthcare industry so far in recent years, long-term success and support come down to having robust, scalable, and future-proof systems.
To strengthen people, you need to strengthen processes.
Here’s how e-learning platforms like Tovuti can effectively mitigate the problems faced by the healthcare industry:
|
Problem |
How e-learning Helps |
Example |
| Understaffing | Scaling and streamlining the onboarding process to enable healthcare managers to hire and process far more new hires than via traditional in-person onboarding methods. | Rather than restricting the scope of onboarding to her personal availability, a nurse manager creates an online onboarding course to educate more new hires in less time. |
| Limited resources | Automating and streamlining administrative processes so healthcare workers can focus on more important patient-facing work | Dentist rolls out a fully automated online learning course to educate nurses on practice management processes. While this is happening, he can maximize his time treating patients and step in to provide patient-facing training. |
| High staff turnover | Attracting top talent by offering thorough, engaging, and rewarding professional development opportunities that staff can undertake in their own time and from home. | An inner-city doctor relocates to a rural area to have more work-life balance. He chooses a job at a local practice because it allows him to keep up with training and regulatory updates from home, without having to travel to a conference. |
Investing in an LMS for healthcare can help organizations transform the way they hire, train, collaborate, and provide their services.
But that doesn’t mean that all e-learning systems are the same. Not all LMS platforms are built with healthcare in mind and may have restrictive features.
It pays to shop around and choose the e-learning provider that understands the unique challenges and requirements of the healthcare industry.
Tovuti LMS was made to support healthcare practitioners with features that empower healthcare professionals.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits you can expect from Tovuti compared to other providers.
Advantages of Online Learning Platforms like Tovuti
We’ve covered a lot of ground discussing the benefits of e-learning for healthcare. So we’ll cut to the chase – this is what sets Tovuti apart from other online learning platforms.
Scalable and flexible system
Whether you’re a local practice or a city hospital, Tovuti can fit your organizational needs while also facilitating your growth.
Our pricing models go from $775/month for 50 users, to $1925/month for 1500 users. We can tailor this further to suit larger federal-level healthcare departments.
Gamification
There’s plenty of data to back up the positive impact of gamification on training outcomes, engagement, and attracting top talent. It’s a no-brainer: people are more able to learn when they’re engaged, or even having fun.
Tovuti boasts sophisticated gamification features that enable healthcare teams to create engaging and interactive training modules, including quizzes, rewards, badges, and company-wide leaderboards.
Fast course creation
The last thing healthcare providers need is to be bogged down by tedious course creation, or worse, course formats that don’t fit their organization.
Tovuti has a built-in library of interactive content modules, so healthcare teams can swiftly build interactive courses using a range of media. If you already have the materials, you can simply upload them to the platform and adapt them to your needs.
The best part is that you don’t have to use a third-party course authoring suite – you can do it all within Tovuti.
Mobile app
Being able to access online learning from home and from your smartphone is a game-changer for healthcare workers.
For example, nurses can complete modules, read up on policies, and check certifications between shifts or on the commute to and from work.
Tovuti isn’t just mobile responsive and accessible on every device. With your Tovuti account, you can set up a branded and specialized mobile app so that employees can access virtual learning tools from their smartphones.
Benefits of eLearning FAQs
“What is the benefit of e-learning and its function?”
e-learning provides training to healthcare professionals via the internet. They can access all training materials in the cloud, and managers can track progress and keep up to date with certifications. The main benefits of e-learning for healthcare are that it saves time and money while improving efficiency, staff retention, and engagement.
“What are the 3 main advantages of eLearning?”
There are many advantages of e-learning for healthcare professionals, but the top three are that it’s cost-effective, accessible, and scalable. This is highly relevant to the healthcare industry as it faces challenges with resource management, enabling remote teams, and growing skilled workforces.
“Is e-learning more effective than traditional learning for health professionals?”
Studies show that e-learning is more effective than traditional learning methods for health professionals. Where traditional learning is fixed to a manager's capacity and resource intensive, e-learning methods are highly scalable and able to provide everyone in a healthcare team with consistently high-quality training.
Unlock the Benefits of eLearning to Empower Your Healthcare Team
Investing in robust and scalable software infrastructure is a game-changer for healthcare organizations of all sizes.
If you’re looking to grow your team and improve your training processes, an e-learning platform is the best way to scale your healthcare workforce while empowering your team and managing costs effectively.
With scalable functionality to meet the growing demands of local and federal-level departments, Tovuti was built specifically with the healthcare industry in mind.
Embrace the benefits of e-learning for healthcare by taking your training resources online. Book a demo today to see how Tovuti can help you make a meaningful difference to your team and your patients.
