Hartford HealthCare_688x376

Hartford HealthCare

April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021

Impact: 

Initiative Management enabled Hartford HealthCare (HHC) to consolidate their learning management into one LMS, and launch Epic throughout the health system. By consolidating learning management into HealthStream Learning, Hartford HealthCare achieved the following benefits:

  • Initiative Management allowed for nearly instantaneous tracking of the 30,000 course assignments that were issued during multiple recent Epic Go-Lives.
  • Annual Required Learning was launched to over 18,000 employees using HCCS Rapid Regulatory courses; tracking completion rates occurred via HealthStream’s KnowledgeQ.
  • Monthly course completions have gone from approximately 3,000 per month to over 45,000 per month due to a consolidated learning platform.
  • A team was created to focus on the initiative that included five eLearning Specialists and two part-time IT personnel. This team was responsible for ensuring consistency and creating standard processes across HHC’s system.
  • Consistency of training assignments and a reduction in the total number of courses by using a system-wide learning management approach.

The Dashboard gives you data at your fingertips, rather than trying to figure out how to run reports, and makes it easy.

The Challenge:

Hartford HealthCare has approximately 18,000 employees and 6,000 contracted staff located in roughly 225 locations throughout Connecticut. These facilities include acute and non-acute locations for medical care, primary care, assisted living, rehabilitation services, healthcare at home, and skilled nursing facilities.

As HHC grew through acquisition of facilities and providers, providing consistent training and reporting on its progress was becoming increasingly difficult. This challenge was mainly due to disparate learning management systems, ranging from paper to computer-based spreadsheets and online systems across the various facilities, with no unified tool to manage and verify training completions. The 8 different electronic learning management systems included 3 separate HealthStream instances as well as systems from 5 other vendors. Also, when HHC decided to conduct organization-wide training, custom materials needed to be developed for each of the platforms.

This presented a big dilemma, as reporting on the results of any single training was a complex process. It involved using several reporting systems and required multiple exports and tracking on numerous spreadsheets just to show training completion rates. Additionally, there were numerous employees across the system with learning management functions as a small percentage of their job. This resulted in a wide variety of policies, procedures, quality, and performance differences across the learning management functions. But, what pushed the need for change to the forefront even more so was that HHC began rolling out a new EMR System, Epic, which required significant training for the entire workforce before anyone could be given access to the new system.

Solution:

Hartford HealthCare employed HealthStream’s Initiative Management to successfully train employees and implement the new EMR roll out across the organization. Working with HealthStream’s Professional Services Implementation team, HHC was able to consolidate all learning management into one platform. This included transferring transcripts from legacy systems and consolidating courses from the multiple independently-used HealthStream platforms, as well as other learning management systems.

Benefitting from the new reporting capabilities, HHC was able to more easily implement their system-wide annual required learning and performance program. Another contributor to HHC’s success was the expertise and labor of HealthStream’s Virtual Admin service, which helped the organization expand its learning management ability and capacity when employee bandwidth was limited.

Results:

The transition involved a one week system-blackout and was completed within a 6-month timeline. The Initiative Management powered nearly instantaneous tracking of the 30,000 course assignments that were issued during multiple recent Epic Go-Lives. Since the implementation, monthly course completions have gone from an average of approximately 3,000 per month to over 45,000 per month. Additionally, in a single month, there were over 100,000 course completions.

Using a unified HealthStream platform, HHC is able to provide education to most employees and contractors via a single assignment. The ability to report completion rates, as well as identify areas needing increased attention has also improved. The time savings for reporting is also significant—by giving managers access to their own data, the time required to run reports has been reduced from two hours to zero. The HHC HealthStream team also created a training video through HealthStream video that was used to assist managers in setting up their own KnowledgeQ reports.