Posted by: Peggy Salvatore
I took a break from weekly blogging for a few weeks while I finished some writing projects – whew! The break had two outcomes: 1) I have an even greater backlog of things to write about and 2) it gave some time for trends to make themselves clear. Here’s the trend that rose to the top:
I am on the board of our local ASTD chapter (American Society for Training and Development), and we have been kicking around the idea of starting an elearning group, but some members of the board weren’t sure - does anybody care? So we put out an announcement that we were going to hold a meeting by webinar on elearning to see if there was any interest. Our registrations have already exceeded our wildest expectations, with our numbers almost three times greater than our best attended sessions. A principle in the world’s largest elearning company is hosting us, and one of our registrants contacted us directly to tell us she was the inventor of elearning back in the 1970s for the government. Double whew!
Elearning makes sense economically more than ever today. It is the cheapest way to get a clear, consistent message to the most people in the least amount of time. In healthcare, even moreso. What better way to educate healthcare workers on the use of IT than to use technology to deliver the message? We’ve been using elearning to train workers across all industries in some skills, particularly manufacturing line workers in processes or transactional workers in soft skills. But just lately this trend is accelerating and spreading beyond the workforce and reaching to the upper echelons of the corporate hierarchy.
Today, we are using elearning modalities to educate, inform and transform at all levels of the organization – webinars, online courses, videos, e-modules, pdfs, list servs – the list goes on and on and on. Any type of computer-based learning from your laptop or your smart phone, anything you can grab from the web, download, participate in virtually, log onto or phone into, is elearning. Healthcare workers are being asked to change their work processes to seamlessly incorporate the use of information technology to provide better patient care. It only makes sense that one of the ways to migrate these workers to the effective use of technology is to also educate them using those same modalities.
I wrote an article last year for eLearning Guild’s emagazine Learning Solutions called “Leveraging the eLearning Advantage in Healthcare.” At the time, I felt like a voice in the wilderness. Now, I am beginning to see the training market tap into this efficient way to meet an acute need for knowledge transfer and culture change as the healthcare system moves from mom-and-pop doctor offices and prescriptions scribbled on paper pads to fully integrated health systems with patient information online and computer physician order entry mandatory.
Let the medium be the message.
EHR’s are the way of future, we just need to make sure that doctors follow the meaningful use guidelines.
Posted by: DrFirst | 09/21/2010 at 06:02 AM