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Customer Uses HealthStream as a Foundation for Healthcare Onboarding

April 1, 2021
April 1, 2021

Background:

HealthStream Nurse OnboardingGreenville Health System (GHS) is a non-profit, academic health system in Greenville, SC, committed to medical excellence through clinical care, education, and research, which it achieves through 14,330 employees serving 1,660 beds. GHS first opened its doors as City Hospital in 1912. During the last 100 years, the organization has evolved from a single, free-standing hospital to a highly integrated delivery system and now an academic health center. In that time, GHS has become the state’s largest non-profit healthcare system and an advocate for healthy living initiatives. In October of 2013, GHS was named as an academic health center, partnering with Clemson University, Furman University, and the University of South Carolina to create the unique, patient-centered clinical university model.

Challenge:

GHS faced the challenge of managing onboarding and compliance for its transient, non-employed staff—students, faculty, interns, contracted and agency staff, volunteers, affiliate physicians, and allied health professionals, who all needed orientation but were not officially employed by GHS so were not tracked in the standard HR information system. In order to legally, safely, and effectively do their jobs, these non-employees needed regulatory training like HIPAA, sexual harassment, and safety courses, as well as ICD-10 training. In accordance with Joint Commission standards, non-employees also needed orientation to their specific role and to GHS as a whole.

Prior to the HLC, orientation elements like GHS policies and procedures were completed and tracked entirely on paper for thousands of associates. It was a very arduous, manual process. Furthermore, many GHS students also had clinical rotations at multiple nearby hospitals and they did not want to have to repeat general requirements for every facility.

“We’ve been with HealthStream for more than 10 years. We started very small with 6,000 employees and over the last few years we have grown to more than 14,000 employees in the system. As one of the largest employers in our area, it was important for Greenville Health System to have a platform like HealthStream that can manage the complexities of onboarding our staff. We saw a common need in our local area with other hospitals. By having a generic core curriculum, students are able to meet their requirements not just to work at GHS, but at other hospitals, as well. Through our relationship with other HealthStream customers, we were able to work together to make a generic core curriculum that would meet the needs of everyone. We have used every part of HealthStream to its fullest and have been able to provide the support throughout our organization to meet all the demands that have been brought to us. I think that’s why HealthStream has been such a success,” said Virginia Reeves, manager, Learning Management System.

Solution:

By utilizing features of the HLC, Easy Scan, HeartCode, and Precyse ICD-10 Training, GHS was able to consistently train and automate compliance tracking and documentation for all of its non-employees in addition to its staff.

HealthStream was also the main factor that enabled the generic, multi-hospital curriculum to be created. Because each participating hospital was already a HealthStream client, they could easily collaborate through special HealthStream User Groups to develop and deliver the same orientation curriculum to traveling students and associates. This also made it easier to track orientation and training when and if students later became full-time, regular staff, because their HealthStream transcript and profile already existed in the system.

“HealthStream is very important to student services as we are responsible for credentialing students and faculty. It is easy for our affiliated academic institutions to onboard the students and faculty and to track that they have met the requirements, and then audit to make sure that the student or faculty has met all the regulatory requirements. Having a centralized learning management system has made it much simpler and user-friendly to manage such a diverse population of students and faculty that come to GHS,” said Sheree Mejia, GHS manager of Nursing Academic Services.

The curriculum approach enabled GHS to develop training specific to different types of students and to quickly make assignments appropriately. By using two types of curricula, Core and GHS Facility-Specific, GHS was able make sure staff met all requirements and were compliant.

“With HealthStream, we have been able to bypass a majority of our orientation, which allows us to put contracted staff on the floor within about 48 hours, which has allowed us to cut costs,” says April Brown, manager of Supplemental Staffing.

Additionally, by utilizing Easy Scan, GHS was easily able to scan its students and faculty into training classes for the School of Medicine. Faculty and students who are with GHS for that program are provided badges that have bar codes identifying their HealthStream user IDs. Easy Scan eliminates the need to manually record attendance from class roster sheets, saving hours of time. As employees swipe their badges when they enter, Easy Scan instantly records attendance directly into the HLC.

“We’ve been using HealthStream for well over a decade and one thing that we have found is that with each passing year, it seems we have the opportunity to really utilize how we use HealthStream for our strategy for learning across the system. Every budget year, when we have to look at our dollars and consider where those allocations go, it’s really without question that we have to have a robust learning management system. So as we think about HealthStream as a partner, we see the opportunity to enhance what we are doing as HealthStream offers more innovation,” said Terrie Long, GHS director of Learning Development.

Impact:

  • Implemented the HealthStream Learning Center (HLC), Easy Scan, HeartCode®, and Precyse ICD- 10 Training across its network for nurse onboarding, regulatory, ICD-10, and resuscitation initiatives for its faculty, staff, students and long-term, contract staff, as well as for all admitting physicians and volunteers.
  • Used the centralization and automation features of the HLC to orient, train, and track more than 20,000 individuals without any increase in hospital staff to manage or deliver training.
  • Reduced training time for contracted new hires to 48 hours, allowing staff to be on the floor faster, resulting in cost savings by reducing staffing needs.
  • Created a generic, core curriculum in conjunction with other area hospitals that satisfies student training requirements at all the hospitals, even those outside Greenville Health System, eliminating costly and wasteful overtraining.

“We have used every part of HealthStream to its fullest and have been able to provide the support throughout our organization to meet all the demands that have been brought to us. I think that’s why HealthStream has been such a success.”

- Virginia Reeves, Manager, Learning Management System