Healthcare Compliance Training: Unlike Other Compliance Training
It would not be unfair to say that but for the binding legal mandates, most industries would ungrudgingly continue without compliance training. But, can the healthcare industry have that luxury?
Healthcare industry is unique; its value proposition hinges on bettering and prolonging patient lives and life outcomes.
The Healthcare industry was quick to adapt to elearning, to move from paper-based classroom training to LMS-driven compliance tracking. This change provided easier and better tracking of compliance records of training completions and prompt fulfillment of binding legal requirements. While elearning was the clear next logical step, there hasn’t been enough emphasis on the reviewing the efficacy of elearning interventions.
The Healthcare staff are notoriously time-pressed in their work engagements, and elearning does seem a natural best choice for training. But, are we spending too much time and money just checking the box?
Here’s a list of the key features of good healthcare compliance training:
1) It should be patient-centric.
In other words, it should be result oriented. Better health outcomes for patients should be prioritized over merely ticking the checklist per compliance requirement.
2) It should be high on applicability quotient.
Much information in compliance training is never operationalized; Compliance training should not merely close the knowledge gap, it should seek to build performance levels.
3) It should be theoretically sound, scientifically established.
While respecting patient’s cultural beliefs is an accepted norm, the healthcare industry and its practitioners work best with practices and procedures that are theoretically sound and scientifically established. Healthcare and Medical Science is a continuously updated body of knowledge, practice, and procedures. Some safety procedures practiced in 18th century would be considered blatantly unsafe today. New practices and procedures need to be substantiated with research and data.
4) It should foster continuous improvement in healthcare management practices.
Compliance training cannot be seen as separate from the quality control program of the healthcare industry. Adverse incident and event monitoring data should necessarily be tied into the outcomes of the compliance training. Smiley sheet evaluations of compliance training do not suffice; measurablity of the effectiveness of compliance/safety training should be tied to decreasing adverse events.
To conclude, the healthcare industry compliance elearning is a special case of compliance training that requires the instructional designers and subject matter experts to be aware of performance-oriented and business goal driven learning objectives.