Follow these steps to select the right healthcare LMS for your hospital.

Have you been tasked with choosing an LMS for your hospital and don’t know where to start?

Evaluating healthcare LMS platforms is a complex task involving many stakeholders. But with a systematic, consultative approach, you will choose the platform that best meets the needs of your hospital.

Let’s get started.

Start with your stakeholders and figure out what’s important.

Most LMS platforms are developed primarily with the learner in mind. This learner-centric approach makes sense for organizations where learners are assigned and complete e-learning courses. When the learner passes the course, they are finished.

But within healthcare, the course is just the beginning. Competency assessments, coaching a precepting are critical parts of the learning journey. For example, a healthcare LMS will usually need to meet the needs of:

Nursing Professional Development
Preceptors
Medical Educators
Attending Physicians (Residency programs)
IT
Corporate
HR
Facilities Management
Chief Risk Officer

Once you have identified the stakeholders, you’ll need to understand what the stakeholders need to achieve with the LMS. You can use high-level use cases to start the process:

Collect Usecases

When starting with high-level use cases, you can begin collecting user stories.

Here are some examples to get you started.

Nursing Professional Development needs to record attendance and performance in Mock Code Blues.
Attending physicians need to be able to rate a resident’s performance against customizable competencies.
An RN needs to view the competencies required for onboarding and request assessment for a competency.
A Preceptor needs to view a list or RNs that need to have an annual assessment.
IT needs LMS users to be logged-out of shared devices after thirty minutes of being inactive.

Once you have the use-cases documented, you can build a detailed requirements list for a healthcare LMS.

Get Ready to Evaluate

You’ll need your team of stakeholders to join you in the evaluation process. An evaluation process should include:

Rating each LMS solution against a matrix developed from use-cases
Vendors demonstrate each use-case from the perspective of each of the stakeholders.
Check the references of each vendor by speaking to their customers. These conversations can be understanding the quality of support, responsiveness, and product stability.
The legal team should review boilerplate contracts and procurement terms.