Posted by: Peggy Salvatore, www.healthsystemed.com
Online learning, e-learning, m-learning, asynchronous learning, web-based curriculum. What do you call it? What is it? And what might it have to contribute to transforming healthcare?
At an ASTD (American Society for Training and Development) Chapter board meeting last spring, we elected to start a special interest group to discuss elearning, and we grappled with finding an identity for what historically has been known as computer-based training. As it turned out, no matter what definitions we used, the concept generated a lot of enthusiasm from our own members and people outside our organization. To date, our elearning special interest group started just two months ago has met or broken attendance records for its first two online meetings.
Knowing our experience, I was a little surprised to see this link in the eLearning Insider Newsletter this week:
Is the LMS Dead?
My answer to that question is another question: Have We Even Started to Tap the Potential of the LMS?
More likely, online knowledge capture, transfer, and measurement for organizational improvement is in its infancy. Even bricks and mortar institutions are looking at their asynchronous classroom offerings and seeing their web-based future. This week, the Chronicle of Higher Education asked the survey question: What role does online learning play on your campus? And then posted this announcement:
"Due to an overwhelming response from our readers, the Online Learning Survey will remain open until Friday, October 29. Don't miss this opportunity to voice your opinions. Online, distance, and blended learning programs are playing a significant role in the way institutions deliver courses and are becoming a part of many institution’s strategic plans."
The move to web-based, asynchronous, online, mobile learning – partnered with social media platforms – means the way we relate education and information can be real-time, all the time. This has important implications for bringing nearly 20% of our economy online and all moving in the same direction. Healthcare (which yes, does account for almost 20% of our economy today) will need to bring millions of providers online in a unified and concerted way to extract the true value and benefit of electronic patient records.
We need face-to-face, boots on the ground teachers to translate some of the high-touch aspects of patient interactions to fully electronic patient records, but a lot of the education can be done in a consistent way, with rapid deployment at the point of service, using all the elearning modalities available to us today.
The LMS isn’t dead. It is one very important piece of a growing healthcare pie.
Peggy Salvatore writes training for the healthcare industry. She developed Health System Ed, a basic health IT training program to advance the uptake of electronic patient records. In addition to the basic e-learning program available online, Health System Ed can be customized for specific healthcare environments and software applications. To learn more about Health System Ed visit www.healthsystemed.com
The digitizing of all healthcare records is a necessary and very useful project for our system to undertake. Not only does it promote efficiency, it promotes better care because our patients records can be much easier to access.
Posted by: Natasha | 07/26/2011 at 07:36 PM