Akron Children’s Hospital streamlines employee and staff training with Infor Learning Management System

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At a glance

Headquarters

Akron, OH

Industry

Healthcare

Product Offering

Pediatric healthcare services

CASE STUDY

Pediatric healthcare system exceeds training objectives and supports high standards of patient care

Akron Children’s Hospital has been dedicated to caring for children and improving their health since 1890. Across a 13-county region of Ohio, Akron Children’s operates two hospital campuses, six regional health centers, 35 pediatrician’s offices, four urgent care clinics, and more than 50 primary and specialty care centers. Together, the system receives more than 1.2 million patient visits per year. The young patients are cared for by 6,900 employees and 3,200 non-employee providers and staff.

Working at Akron Children’s is more than a job—it’s a culture of caring. Delivering excellent child- and family-centered care is the organization’s central mission. Employees commit to treating each child as they would their own. Providing top-notch training to all employees and non-staff providers is an essential element of the organization’s commitment to patient care.

It is the responsibility of the Talent Development team to provide training to ensure patient care is delivered in a consistent way that conforms to both regulatory and Akron Children’s standards. They rely on Infor Learning Management System (LMS) to streamline learning content, automate course delivery, track learners’ progress, and report on compliance.

By exceeding our goal and reducing the time required to complete annual education by 21%, our organization saved $137,588. Every time our training can result in organizational savings or an improvement in billing and collections, it has a positive impact on our ability to deliver patient care.”

Michelle Weber

MPH, MSN, RN, NPDBC, CPN, Senior Instructional Design & Development Specialist Talent Development

Challenges

Lowering the cost and time burden of annual safety and compliance training.

Optimizing the learning experience for employees and non-employee staff.

Increasing the number of learners who complete training by compliance deadline.

Solutions

Reduced time required to complete annual training by 21%, saving the organization $137,588 and freeing providers’ time to care for patients.

Reorganized and streamlined content to reduce annual compliance learning modules from 13 to 5. Created new certificates for additional learning.

Gained the ability to track training status in real-time, filter learners who have not completed, and send automated reminders with direct links to content, resulting in 97% compliance by deadline.

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Developing an engagement learning experience for healthcare professionals

Senior Instructional Design and Development Specialist, Michelle Weber explained Akron Children’s delivers two types of training to ensure patient care. First, every staff and non-staff member attends mandatory trainings, including annual safety and compliance education and initial onboarding. Second, the organization offers relevant trainings designed around specific topics to employees and non-staff providers based on their roles.

Healthcare workers have little time to spare. The primary challenge in training is how to deliver all of the knowledge needed in a concise, time-saving format. Akron Children’s needed a learning management system that could meet compliance requirements, yet also deliver an engaging learning experience.

After using two previous learning management systems, Weber stated, “Infor LMS is the best learning system we’ve ever had at Akron Children’s Hospital. I find the back-end of the system is easier to use by far for content creation, reporting, and tracking.”

Exceeding training goals with learning management

Weber was delighted with the results, noting “Infor LMS contributed to the successful achievement of our training objectives, including streamlining content and making it easier to find, reducing the time needed to complete compliance training by 21%, increasing compliance by the designated deadline by 4%, and earning higher learner satisfaction ratings.”

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Meeting compliance requirements and deadlines

Akron Children’s must ensure they train both staff and non-staff in compliance with standards set by the Joint Commission, the Ohio Department of Health, and other regulatory organizations. Demonstrating compliance requires careful tracking of who has completed onboarding, as well as annual safety and compliance training, and making sure the training was completed on time. After their 4% improvement in 2022, the organization achieves 97% compliance by the designated deadline.

Infor LMS helps Akron Children’s meet compliance deadlines by displaying the status of training completion and making it easy to filter the overall group of learners by those who have not yet completed assigned learning. Then she can send additional targeted reminders through the system, with deep links that take learners to the exact spot within the training modules that they haven’t yet completed.

“Infor LMS makes it easy to sort and filter our training data. I’ve created a report with the main information regulatory bodies ask for during audits. I can usually provide a report with everything auditors need in less than 10 minutes,” said Weber.

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Reducing the cost and time burden of training

In healthcare, as in all fields, ‘time is money.’ Weber’s extensive work in streamlining the annual training modules and removing any repetitive material, along with time-saving features in Infor LMS, helped Akron Children’s make a significant reduction in training time. This time-savings provides an important return on investment—professionals receive the training they need, with more time leftover to look after patients.

“By exceeding our goal and reducing the time required to complete annual education by 21%, our organization saved $137,588. Every time our training can result in organizational savings or an improvement in billing and collections, it has a positive impact on our ability to deliver patient care,” Weber said.

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Improving learner experience

The ease of use and flexible features of Infor LMS enhance learner experience and help professionals fit more training into their busy schedules. Akron Children’s surveyed employees to see what created a better user experience for them. The top choices selected by learners were the improvements to the look and feel of the modules (44%), having fewer modules to complete (41%), and that the LMS remembered where they left off within each module (41%). Being able to return directly to the remaining portion of a module prevented repetitive work and improved training efficiency.

“I appreciate the way Infor LMS makes it easy to make improvements, such as adding icons and colors that distinguish course groupings visually,” said Weber. “This helps employees more quickly find training relevant additional training to improve processes and help patients. By employee request, we added the time needed to complete each module. Audience descriptions help our learners quickly ascertain whether a course is for staff or non-staff.”

Leveraging opportunities to advance patient care

Based on their success with Infor LMS, the talent development team is eagerly expanding the organization’s training offerings. They created five optional certificate programs for curious employees to go deeper with learning, and the team continues to explore additional ideas.

Being able to develop and deliver new training easily helps Akron Children’s identify new opportunities to strengthen patient care through education, including:

Nurse training: Optional learning modules help nurses quickly find and digest extra knowledge about how to care for patients with specific illnesses or conditions.
Hospital admissions training: Revenue is critical to ongoing patient care, and incorrect admission orders negatively impact billing and collections. After delivering training to all admitting providers, Weber is eager to measure impact on future revenue.
Affirming care: The organization created training for providers working with LGBTQ patients.
COVID-19 vaccinations: Akron Children’s even used Infor LMS in a creative way to schedule, manage, and track staff vaccinations.

Akron Children’s is in the process of adopting Social Collaboration in Infor LMS to create collaborative communities where learners start discussions, ask for advice, and post links to resources. The initial communities involve leadership development and empowerment, including groups for Rising Nurse Leaders and first-time managers.

The partnership between Akron Children’s and Infor remains central to their ongoing training strategy, and Weber appreciates the responsiveness and robust support she receives. She noted, “The customer service we have received from Infor is second-to-none. We have a dedicated customer success manager, and ticket response is very fast.”