The global shift toward digital media has turned the world upside down. Businesses are leveraging online systems to keep their operations streamlined and meet their specific goals. The digitalization of the healthcare industry for team training is one of the most significant examples in this area.
Increasing investments in this area are helping medical teams to deliver a quality care experience to the patients. With the right Learning Management Systems to help, healthcare businesses are capitalizing digital wave to ensure their teams are up-to-date on the global standards and prove their competence. However, choosing the right LMS and, most importantly, selection between canned and bespoke alternatives keeps organization owners awake at night.
To help out, here we are talking about the best choice and what makes it right for healthcare organizations of various sizes. And if you are still on the fence deciding whether you need an LMS or not, we have got you covered.
Let’s dig in.
What is LMS?
Learning Management Systems (LMS) offers a streamlined way for organizations to train their employees. They incorporate all the important features such as course creation, delivery, management, reporting, assessments, and analytics of the training material. Thanks to the perfect simulation of virtual learning environments, LMS allows trainers to conduct their classes from anywhere, anytime. At the same time, learners can use the device of their preferences to access training material, upload assignments, take assessments, share information or ask a query. This creates a dynamic learning environment that supports modern learning methods that are collaborative, flexible, and personalized.
Why are Traditional Learning Methods Unable to Meet the Current Demands of the Learners?
The Healthcare industry, like many others, relied mainly on face-to-face lectures, self-directed book-based learning, and lecture notes until the last century. However, the dominance of the internet and computing devices has expanded a new mediation of knowledge via digital learning. Not only do these tools allow for 24/7 availability, but they address multiple gaps that traditional systems cannot.
Disadvantages of the Offline Employee Training:
Lack of Training Resources
Online learning solutions enable peers and training staff to upload material online. This way, students have access to a wide pool of learning material at their disposal. They can collaborate on the same and improve these available resources. Additionally, lecture notes/ text files are available for the students on their cloud, which gives them access at any time.
Time and Location Flexibility
An emergency can come up anytime for the tutors and the students. Relying on the traditional teaching methods causes you to miss out on the classes, which costs the organization in terms of financial and time resources. However, in the case of online training, trainers can conduct sessions from anywhere across the globe, and students can attend these sessions based on their availability.
Interactive Learning
Online classes offer the possibility of training powered by self-evaluation, applying and checking the knowledge with exercises, quizzes, multiple-choice questions, training tests, etc. With direct feedback. This allows for an interactive learning experience that is unavailable in the offline training mode. Students can also leverage offline simulations to treat a virtual human being without live tests subjects and gain expertise.
Language Flexibility
If you have a healthcare organization that hires resources from across the globe, your growth needs to offer an environment with zero language barriers. Having physical training staff can impact this idea adversely, keeping employees from certain demographics lagging. However, with an LMS in place, you can ensure quality training experience for each one of your employees. They can choose to have the lectures and notes translated from one language to another, thereby keeping pace with others.
Scalability
Are you a globally located healthcare organization or need to train thousands of employees? Certainly, instructor-led classroom training cannot help you achieve your training goals. Having an LMS in place can help you deliver the sessions to hundreds or thousands of students without compromising quality. Not only this, but instructors can also save their valuable time by having their lecture once rather than conducting a session for each batch.
Cost Saving
LMS can significantly keep a check on the training budget. Studies have found that virtual training can reduce the training budget by one-third. It is primarily because:
- Once the sessions are recorded, you don’t need an instructor
- Classroom facilities are not needed
- Paper-based learning material is not required.
Training Standards and Uniformity
LMS can bring standards and uniformity to training. It ensures that each trainee receives the relevant, accurate, and same information as the others, regardless of the differences in instructor styles, knowledge, or preferences.
These systems are designed to update information in multiple content objects from a single source. The rest of the authors contribute value to the same material, and changes once made are reflected in each of them.
Self-Paced Learning
Content in an LMS can adapt dynamically according to the learner’s preferences and requirements. Some AI and ML-based systems can analyze students’ level of knowledge and learning progress to personalize the learning experience. Students can skip the part of the training they are already familiar with and select learning activities that suit them. Therefore, rather than being the passive receptor of information provided by others, they can actively participate in the training sessions.
Collaborative Learning
Geographically diverse trainers and trainees can come together on LMS and form a collaborative learning community. Students can ask questions, share opinions, discuss sessions, and more.
Stay Compliant as a Team
Healthcare organizations need to ensure their team is updated with the latest compliance standards and educational initiatives. With an LMS by your side, you can easily track these and help the lagging teammates. Administrators can suggest courses to the healthcare workers and check if they have taken them. They can also plan assessments to boost competitive spirit among the learners and know how well the information is retained.
Also Read: A Complete Guide on eLearning Software Development
How to Choose the Right LMS?
Choosing the right LMS is a crucial decision for your healthcare organization. Although you can select based on a basic collection of the functional elements, each feature you choose should agree with your organizational goals and learners and their goals. It is important to consider the requirements of each user category. For instance, if your organization chooses a system solely optimized for your business requirements, you could sacrifice your financial resources, time for your trainees and administrators, or even worse, compromise with the opportunity to have a well-versed team.
Durability is another important aspect of an LMS. This means that the system you deploy should be capable of adapting to market requirements and standards in the future. At the same time, it should be easily upgradable and add value to your technological goals with periodic maintenance.
Like all the other Custom Healthcare Solutions , an LMS should also be extensible, scalable, and well-knit to satisfy the overall enterprise structure of the organization. Extensibility considers system modularity and how the system can be customized to changing user demands. When checking the system for scalability, it is important to evaluate if it can meet potential volume demands through growth. Organizational fit considers other important factors, such as how well the system can fit into the organizations’ non-learning specific business operations. For this, the training department and non-learning stakeholders must be in discussion from the very beginning.
What are the Benefits of Custom LMS for a Healthcare Organization?
Exclusive Ownership with Personalization
The main drawback of an off-the-shelf learning management system is its mix of functionality to help different types of businesses. While a small clinic may have access to a brand’s LMS, your organization can deploy the same regardless of your size and requirement. It compromises some of your challenges and requires you to pay for the features that may not be as beneficial to you. That’s not the case with a custom learning management system. Hiring a custom eLearning development company allows you to build software from scratch that aligns with your organizational goals. You can ask for customizations in UI/ UX, backend, functionality that is deemed fit for you and pays only for the services that you need.
Scalability for Your Organization
Scalability is a system’s ability to adapt to changing user and market demands. Every business aims to grow with time and scale its operations. This requires adding more healthcare offerings to your service spectrum, ultimately adding to your team and processes. Not all the off-the-shelf solutions are equipped to handle this growth graph and resultantly prove a waste of investment.
One can go for open-source LMS and plan on upgrading them. However, introducing many changes ultimately impacts the efficiency of these systems, causes buggy software in place and potentially causes the risk to your business uptime and data security.
Thankfully, with a custom LMS development company, you can eliminate these challenges. Having a team of developers by your side, you have the scope for handling business growth without compromising software quality. Therefore, the business can continue using the same software with the features they need.
Increased Return on Investment
Healthcare organizations are hesitant to invest in custom software development due to greater upfront costs. However, even though it involves a higher price initially, it doesn’t need you to renew the license often, which proves cost-inefficient in the long run. Additionally, you don’t have to buy additional hardware, acquire features at a certain cost, and, as mentioned above, pay for the features that you don’t use. Therefore, this reduces the investment considerably and offers an opportunity to boost ROI.
Integration with Existing ERP Systems
Technology is growing fast, which requires the healthcare industry to automate various operations and systems. An LMS needs to integrate with these software solutions to streamline the organization. Although off-the-shelf systems integrate with these ERPs, there are times when they fail to. Even when they align, it poses a risk to the security of the healthcare records throwing you prey to potential penalties and even costly business downtime.
Having custom LMS solutions lets you keep this problem at bay as they are designed to fit your existing systems without any threats. You can also update your healthcare ERP to the latest technology and make essential technology shifts to gain an edge. All this, with a strong team of healthcare LMS developers with you.
Continuous Support and Maintenance
Ongoing support is another vital aspect that adds positive points to custom software development. Off-the-shelf software brands may or may not offer you support when you need it. However, custom healthcare development companies make sure you have an experienced, certified team by your side to help you navigate the tough times. They know your goals and application inside out, which gives them a broader view of the scenario. Not only this, they are liable to solve your issues within the mutually agreed time which does not leave hanging in between.
Personalize Learning for Your Employees
No one has a better idea of your employees than you do. Having these insights can add value to the software meant to deliver the training to your team. As off-the-shelf systems are made to serve various businesses, they don’t consider these insights.
A custom software development company can help you here. A bespoke LMS includes custom dashboards, progress monitoring, note-keeping, live simulation, etc. You can also ask the custom software development company to add pre-built visual aids to add and boost their learning experience more.
Allows You to Add Gamification
Gamification is an excellent way to keep your training team (trainers and trainees) motivated and engaged. Custom LMS lets you introduce various elements to gamify the learning process with badges, reward points, leaderboards, etc. As it keeps employees competitive, they are encouraged to perform more.
This also helps you gain a bird’s eye view of how your trainees are performing and make informed decisions when the need be.
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Easier to Update and Add New Course Content
The Healthcare industry is susceptible to constant changes and upgrades as new diseases are discovered, treatments are introduced, and more. Healthcare staff needs to stay on top of the knowledge curve to stay competitive and add value to the patient-centric care system.
The easiest way for you to introduce these changes to your employees is via LMS, and custom systems allow you to make the process easier. You can use intuitive admin dashboards to upload new material on the software in minutes and send a notification across your teams. The process is simpler but is less time-consuming for everyone.
Ensure Data Security and Compliance
Security of data is one of the most vital aspects of operating a healthcare organization in any world. It is an important part of compliance and standards, and even the smallest breach can be detrimental to the organization’s uptime. Relying on off-shelf-systems opens you to the potential risk of data theft and can take your sensitive content to non-secure locations.
A custom LMS is developed, keeping HIPAA compliance at the core. This ensures that all the information is secure in up-to-the-minute servers with standard rules.
Matellio for Custom LMS Development
Having a custom LMS solution for your healthcare organization is an investment that’s evident to pay in the long run. With many benefits to offer, it also adds value to your business processes and aligns all your teams with the right set of information, processes, and brand value. Matellio can be your perfect partner in this custom healthcare LMS development journey. Having combined the industry understanding of eLearning and the healthcare industry, we are well acquainted with the unique demands of your audience, in this case, the healthcare workers. Standing with our team of expert, certified 150+ engineers, we offer HIPPA, EHR, and HL7 compliant solutions that help you stay ahead of the competition curve. Book a FREE 30-minute consultation call with us to discuss your challenges and how we can build a custom LMS solution for your healthcare organization.
