by Quang Nguyen, Senior Manager
The COVID-19 global pandemic, combined with the continuing shift in healthcare to “do more with what you have,” has permanently changed the way hospital systems operate. The rapid emergence of virtualized operations has created a chain reaction that impacts the delivery and support of healthcare. This has been particularly evident in the Clinical Training and Support spaces where the rapidly increased staffing needs make an organization’s ability to quickly onboard and train ever more critical. While virtualized systems existed previously, COVID-19 has created unique barriers and complications that must be addressed to support these important resources.
At Divurgent, we work with our clients to modernize their training delivery to fit this new world, while maintaining the quality required to ensure new staff delivers high-value care. One of the most successful spaces to achieve this has been taking the pre-existing curriculum and converting it to eLearning modules, providing greater flexibility to the learner population while maintaining robust content. Our approach is not limited to straight conversion, but rather to help modernize content to adhere to adult learning principles while making the training prescriptive to a user’s workflow. This helps transform the message around systems training from being an IT project to a Clinical Transformation initiative.
Below is a summary of our playbook and how we work with our clients to understand the goals of training from the workflow, training delivery, and maintenance strategy.
Curriculum Assessment
In this initial phase, we work with the organization’s training and informatics teams to understand the current curriculum. We interview key stakeholders to understand their desired outcomes from training, as well as areas to focus on as training is updated.
- Purpose: Understand the current roadmap of training content, delivery, and feedback from both the training and users
- Goals: Develop an inventory of skills being trained on, map to training delivery, and assess the adherence to user workflows
Workflow Sessions/Job Shadowing
To help connect training to operations, we perform workflow analysis to identify best practices at the organization and understand how they can be applied in training materials and activities. The amount of functionality in a system can dilute what is learned by users. This phase of work helps prioritize and clarify what should be trained, resulting in prescriptive delivery of systems training.
- Purpose: Understand the training delivery and operational workflows
- Goals: Outline the workflows being taught and used by learners; form reconciliation of what exists in the current curriculum as compared to what is being performed in the “real-world”
Module Development
Divurgent has access to eLearning experts to help develop training content that is meaningful to an organization’s users and ensures alignment to strategic training goals. Through this process, we work with training SMEs, informaticists, and clinical leadership to develop high-quality, workflow-based eLearnings.
- Purpose: Develop simulation-style eLearning based on the workflow feedback from the discovery and data gathering phases
- Goals: Deliver training content that equips learners to perform their job functions at a high level
Content Maintenance
We understand that successful training programs require continuous maintenance and connection to the organization. To promote this, Divurgent works with organizational leadership to outline recommendations to continually address the education and support needs of their clinicians.
- Purpose: Understand the training strategy for maintaining training content in a dynamic healthcare setting
- Goals: Outline standard operation procedures, workflows, and timeframes on when training content will be updated
During the Physician Burnout Breakout Session, KLAS noted that physicians who feel the initial system training is good are two-times less likely to turnover within that organization; additionally, physicians who said training was good were five-times more likely to feel efficient in the system. Efficient physicians are also less likely to turnover. In today’s climate especially, good virtual learning and training solutions are critical to physician efficiency and satisfaction.
Insights from KLAS Arch Collaborative National Summit 2020
Sample Benefits
The outcomes we have seen from this work are tangible savings in resource costs for clinicians, increased flexibility for users, more impactful training, and reduction in Service Desk tickets. Socially distanced, effective training allows clinicians to focus on the delivery of patient care, and train in a socially distanced environment.
| Benefits | Example Outcomes | ||
|---|---|---|---|
 | Effective training content |  | Potential savings of $37,500 physician compensation per 25 physicians for each curriculum converted to eLearning (reduce from 8 Hours) |
| Flexibility for users to train and reduction of time needed for training |  | Capacity increase of .5 Trainer FTE per training week |
