There’s a lot to consider when planning learning and development opportunities for healthcare teams — and a regular learning management system doesn’t always cut it.
To meet the needs of your organization and its employees, you need a dedicated learning management system designed specifically for healthcare. Find the right one and the training process becomes much easier and more effective.
Here, we look at why a healthcare LMS is useful for any healthcare organization and what key features to look for when choosing one.
Why do you need a healthcare LMS?
Healthcare organizations have specific needs when it comes to staff training, continuous learning programs, certification, and upskilling.
As research and best practices are constantly evolving, you need a way to keep staff abreast of the latest developments. You also have a large workforce, working different shifts, potentially in different locations, so you need to go beyond traditional, classroom-based learning to give everyone the required training.
A medical LMS helps you to overcome training challenges.
It helps you to keep employees up-to-date with best practices, ensure staff understand new patient safety measures, easily onboard new employees, and teach existing employees about the latest treatments. As a result, you make training more effective and efficient. You also ensure higher standards of care and better health outcomes for patients.
7 things to look for in a healthcare learning management system
A learning management system for healthcare is designed with healthcare organizations in mind. But what should you be looking for when deciding which one to use?
Reporting and tracking capabilities
A healthcare LMS with robust reporting and tracking features makes life easier for your learning and development leaders.
With the right data at their fingertips, they find it easier to assign and schedule courses, tailoring training to each staff member and their role. They can also track participant learning over time, seeing the progress they’re making with courses and certifications.
L&D leaders can take a holistic view of training programs, too. Which courses have good engagement? Which have the best completion rates? This type of data helps you to improve your L&D programs, making them even more effective in future.
Compliance and competency training
A good healthcare LMS should have all the functionality you need to keep your organization compliant with regulations.
It allows you to automatically enroll staff onto the courses they need to complete, as well as send out automated reminders to staff so they complete compliance training on time.
Testing and certification capabilities are also important. This means you can use your medical LMS to train, test, and certify staff as part of a seamless compliance process.
Customization
One size rarely fits all, so your chosen LMS should adapt to the needs of your organization.
You should be able to incorporate your own branding, as this creates a more cohesive experience for learners and confirms the relevance of the training to them and their roles.
You may also want to offer content in a variety of languages and, depending on the needs of your workforce, you may want to create different versions of your LMS for different departments. This multi-tenancy setup lets you tailor each LMS version to each individual department, without having to duplicate LMS admin tasks.
Self-directed, mobile learning
Healthcare staff are busy. They tend to work shift patterns and don’t spend their days sitting in front of a computer.
A good healthcare LMS helps you bring training to your teams. It provides a mobile option, perhaps in the form of an app, that allows staff to access course content from their smartphones.
It also offers self-directed learning options, which employees can complete at their own pace. This means they can make course progress at a time and a place that’s convenient for them.
By offering healthcare staff flexible course options, you make it easier for them to fit training into their busy schedules.
Easy onboarding
Hanging onto healthcare staff isn’t always easy. But we know that onboarding plays an important role in reducing staff turnover and helping new hires to feel part of the team quickly.
With a healthcare LMS, it’s easy to conduct initial training for new employees. You can also use your LMS to plan face-to-face appointments, so onboarding doesn’t just take place online.
Pick a good medical LMS and you’ll be able to automate onboarding training tasks or create a personalized onboarding experience for each new employee.
Personalized learning
When learning is personalized, it’s more engaging, which leads to better knowledge retention and course completion rates. So, pick a healthcare LMS that allows you to create personalized learning pathways, designed around each individual employee.
You may also like to look for an LMS that automatically adapts to learner preferences, giving them greater control over their own learning journey.
Scalability and integrations
You probably already have a bunch of software your teams use day to day. Life is made much easier when your LMS integrates with those systems.
When choosing a medical LMS, look for a solution that provides seamless integrations, even if your software is dated, extensive, or complex.
You also need an LMS with the ability to scale. That way, no matter how big your organization gets and no matter how many employees choose to login at once, your LMS keeps up with demand.
How Moodle helps healthcare providers
An LMS with the features listed above helps you make your training and development programs more streamlined, engaging, and successful. It helps you to develop a training program that perfectly fits the needs of your organization and your learners.
Moodle is an LMS for healthcare that ticks all the boxes:
- Personalized, on-demand learning
- Customizable and scalable features
- In-depth reporting
- Compliance management
- Easy integrations
- A mobile app
Moodle has everything you need to deliver training programs to your healthcare workforce.
