Parkland Health and Hospital System turns to online staff training
More than three-quarters of healthcare professionals report "major or moderate shifts" toward online training during the pandemic.
Dallas, Texas-based Parkland Health and Hospital System is able to continue training its staff amid the COVID-19 pandemic through a new virtual platform partnership.
The platform, through software developer Orasi, is OrasiLabs, a cloud-based system accessible through a web browser. It supports instructors by allowing them to see an "over-the-shoulder" view of students' monitors, giving them the option to take control of a student's keyboard and mouse when necessary. It also provides attendance data.
Providers are billed by the amount of usage recorded.
WHY THIS MATTERS
Health systems typically rely on in-person staff training, but as it's affected everything else is healthcare, COVID-19 changed the way providers conduct training.
During the pandemic, Parkland needed to keep up staff training and it needed to find a way to do so remotely.
"We have always conducted these trainings in person in both small and large classrooms, allowing for hands-on instruction," said Daniel Cluck, the senior clinical informatics learning specialist at Parkland. "COVID-19 put an end to that just when we needed to train more than 400 new residents on Epic, an electronic health records system. But we couldn't pause training."
Maintaining staff training should be a priority for healthcare practices, according to the Journal of Oncology Practice. Proper training can lead to higher employee retention, better staff morale, more efficiency across the facility, better job competency and higher patient satisfaction.
Specifically for EHRs, teaching medical staff best practices can lead to better documentation, fewer medical errors, increased efficiency and improved patient outcomes, according to an article from Medicine.
THE LARGER TREND
COVID-19 has led to a massive increase in online learning for employees. In fact, 76% of healthcare professionals reported they experienced "major or moderate shifts" toward online training during the pandemic, according to a recent Relias survey.
Northwell Health also recently turned towards online training, as it launched its Just in Time Teaching Tools app to aid in the advancement of medical education knowledge and the teaching skills of students, trainees and faculty.
Twitter: @HackettMallory
Email the writer: mhackett@himss.org
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