The healthcare industry is one that’s fast-evolving. There are new products and services introduced almost daily. Continual technological breakthroughs make it possible to perform medical procedures in ways that assure better patient outcomes than before. And with an ever-increasing volume of research, updated laws and stricter statues governing the delivery of patient care, it’s mandatory that healthcare professionals stay up-to-date with all this evolution in order to remain compliant.

Mandated learning never stops

Healthcare in the U.S. is very regulated. In fact, there’s an alphabet-soup of bureaus, departments, Acts and statutes that regulate and mandate how healthcare professionals deliver services, including:

  • S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of the Inspector General (OIG)
  • The Healthcare Information Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
  • The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)
  • The Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH)
  • The Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA)
  • The Affordable Care Act (ACA)
  • Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act (MACRA)
  • Merit-Based Incentive Payments System (MIPS)

And each of these entities and laws have mandated compliance associated with them. Whether it is Continuing Professional Education (CPE), Continuing Professional Development (CPD), mandatory re-certification, or compliance training, it seems as though healthcare professionals are constantly on the learning path. It’s no wonder then that many in the industry suffer from “learning overload”.

The result: What should otherwise be an experience that doctors, physicians, surgeons, nurses, and ER attendants look forward to, becomes something they dread. Eyes roll every time a hospital administrator or department head mentions the “C” word (Compliance). And each time a licensed healthcare practitioner realizes he/she is up for recertification training; they get stressed out thinking about what that entails.

Part of the problem lies in the fact that compliance and certification training is often a mandated course of action, and therefore not something that most healthcare professionals look forward to. But it doesn’t have to be that way! Although healthcare practitioners are in a profession that entails life-long training and learning, there are instructional design strategies and approaches that training developers can embrace to make it a more engaging experience.

Bringing engagement to mandatory training

Here are three elements to consider when developing healthcare training content. If you build your courses around these three pillars, you’ll not only have better training outcomes, but you’ll also foster learner engagement through the process.

  • Content matters

Just as it is a challenge for healthcare providers to keep up with the fast-changing landscape of the healthcare body of knowledge, so is it for instructional designers to continually update or produce learning content around that ever-expanding knowledge pool. Here are some tips to help you manage your content:

  • Make the content as cutting-edge as possible. For instance, if there’s information about a newer approach to laser eye surgery or treating infectious diseases, make sure your content speaks to those new developments, rather than regurgitating older content
  • Where research in a field of health-sciences moves particularly rapidly, such as breakthrough cancer treatments, it might not be possible for instructional designers to continually (every day/month) update their content. In such situations, it helps to post links to authoritative websites or learning portals where learners can continually access updated content
  • New healthcare terminology and concepts are constantly evolving and, therefore, challenging for professionals to keep up with. Make sure your content doesn’t shy away from tackling these relatively unfamiliar items. Do so earlier in the lessons so learners establish a strong foundation for the remainder of the course
  • As an instructional designer creating specialized healthcare learning content, you should consider partnering with commercial healthcare training content providers to supplement some of your own content and curriculum. Organizations such as Health Stream offer a range of mandatory and continuing education in Acute Care, Post-Acute Care, Ambulatory Surgery, Home Health, and Patient Safety. Use these modules as add-on content that you customize for your clients.

Finally, to avoid learning-overload, keep the content bite-sized. Use one-minute reviews, micro-videos, and flashcards to condense your content into digestible modules.

  • Content delivery matters

The best way to engage “bored” medical professionals is to spice up your content. You can do so by leveraging simulation tools, devices, and software to deliver your content. For instance, Vision for life is an Abbott Medical Optics (AMO) vision technology that healthcare providers can use to improve their patient’s vision and help them move away from using glasses and contact lenses.

By using simulation software to teach staff (marketing technicians and sales representatives) about the features, benefits, and use of the new technology, AMO not only increased efficient practitioner adoption of the procedure, but they also improved learner engagement in the program.

Leveraging the power of virtual reality (VR) content in the delivery of your training modules is yet another great option to stimulate participant engagement. Healthy Simulation is a medical technology company that delivers “…enhanced initial, refresher, and sustainable medical education and training.” Their flagship simulation program, called HumanSim®, uses cutting-edge technologies, such as dynamic virtual human technology (DVHT) to sharpen the decision-making and assessment capabilities of healthcare providers across a spectrum of disciplines.

When developing gaming, role-playing, simulation, VR or any other immersive healthcare training content, here are a few things to keep in mind to foster learner engagement and participation:

  • Keep it real: Make sure your environment mimics, as much as possible, the environment in which you expect the learners to deliver the service/procedure they are training
  • Mix it up: Create diverse sets of scenarios and roles so that participating healthcare professionals don’t get bored walking through the same roles or case studies
  • Repeat it frequently: The objective of simulated healthcare training, especially as it pertains to ensuring learners are fully compliant with new procedures, policies, and statues, is to make learners repeat each aspect of the mandatory content many times during the course, albeit using variations of the underlying compliance protocols

Finally, you will accomplish the best training content outcomes when the curriculum includes two-way feedback. As part of your content, give learners feedback – both right and wrong, and insist on receiving feedback – both positive and negative, from them. This approach will not only ensure better outcomes for your learners but will help you enhance and refine future iterations of your content.

  • Tracking, rating and scoring matters

You can achieve some of the best compliance training outcomes when you track, rate and score performance fairly. While learners don’t necessarily want to attend mandatory training sessions, they will exit the session with a sense of accomplishment if they feel the assessment and ratings are fair.

  • Where possible, use online tracking tools that can monitor and track the compliance status of your audience. Organizations like MediaLab offer a suite of tools and checklists to help healthcare professionals stay on top of their compliance and continuing education learning
  • Include frequent compliance assessment quizzes and exercises throughout your modules so you continually evaluate learners on core learning concepts
  • Balance your assessment and scoring strategy so that no single assessment overshadows the learners’ performance – either negatively or positively – in the overall course

Most importantly, your course must include a fair, open and transparent tracking and scoring component where participating practitioners can view their individual scores and, if required, challenge the assessment. Given the significant implication that mandated training could have on the participating practitioners’ professional career, say, on certification or licensing, care providers should know, upfront, how their performance is tracked, and what industry benchmarks you use to assess/rate them against.