How to Meet the Needs of Training for Healthcare Professionals

In the universal set “healthcare training,” there are many subsets. Professional healthcare subgroups requiring specialized training include:

• Doctors
• Nurses 
• EMTs
• Paramedics
• Medical sales personnel
• Lab technicians
• Pharmacists

But even within each professional subset, training needs will vary: pediatricians, cardiologists, and obstetricians, for example, will require different training foci to keep up-to-date with the knowledge and other requirements in their subdisciplines. 

But even at the level of subdiscipline, will every pediatric surgeon need to focus on the same materials for training? Of course not. And therein lies one of the stumbling blocks of traditional approaches to healthcare training.

 The best training for healthcare professionals will take as its starting point the fact that individual practitioners have different training needs that will have to be met in order to achieve learner mastery.

Because Adaptive Learning adjusts curriculum materials to cater to individual learners, it is able to circumvent the pitfalls of traditional healthcare training that uses a one-size-fits-none approach.

Adaptive Learning: Personalizing Training for Healthcare Professionals

Adaptive Learning improves training outcomes for healthcare professionals because it provides personalized training for each learner. Here’s how the Adaptive Learning biological approach tailors the training curriculum to suit every learner’s needs:

Formative Assessment: The biological model presents the learner with a series of questions to ascertain the individual’s knowledge level, as well as the learner’s confidence in their answers. Less confidence in an answer, even if the answer is correct, suggests that the learner would benefit from additional exposure to the learning material.

Personalized Learning: Once the biological model has assessed the learner’s knowledge and confidence, it will formulate a learning program that will address the learner’s personal gaps in knowledge, or identify areas of weakness that require a boost.

Recharge: Everyone has a natural tendency to forget. Adaptive Learning addresses individual forgetting curves by providing continual reinforcement of learning topics. Material may be present in different ways to ensure that the learner gains confidence in these topics and demonstrates learner mastery. 

Better Training Means Better Healthcare Outcomes

The personalized approach, offered through formative assessment with built-in opportunities for recharging knowledge, will benefit healthcare professionals and improve patient outcomes because it:

• Provides opportunities to uncover and eliminate unconscious incompetence — what learners don’t know they don’t know. Uncovering and eliminating unconscious incompetence is particularly important in healthcare because it can literally mark the difference between saving a life or a poor patient outcome.
• Has been proven to train faster than traditional training methods in other industries — up to 50% faster without sacrificing quality — and healthcare should be no different. This will be welcome news to busy healthcare providers who are among the most time-poor professionals worldwide.
• Ensures learner mastery. No learner is left behind. And if one learner needs more time to master a concept or procedure than another, the Adaptive Learning AI will adjust its pace. Every learner will have opportunities to learn what is relevant to their needs, and at a pace that works for them.

In the long run Adaptive Learning will also save your company money because you won’t need a separate LMS. Adaptive Learning will provide targeted training for each group under one umbrella to allow you to easily monitor individual, group, and company-wide results. This monitoring will give you insight into:

• areas of training in which many employees are underperforming, in which case you may need to boost training in these areas;
• areas of training that many or all learners have mastered, in which case it may be time to update the training materials; and
• areas of unconscious incompetence that need immediate action to ensure a safer working environment for staff and better outcomes for patients.

Get Better Healthcare Training Results With Adaptive Learning

Training for healthcare professionals is better with Adaptive Learning. Three different healthcare stakeholders:

• Coloplast,
• NEJM Group, and
• AACC.

each partnered with Area9 to improve their healthcare training outcomes. In each case, the results demonstrated that Adaptive Learning helped healthcare professionals to reach and exceed their training targets, including improved understanding of and confidence in selling ostomy products (Coloplast), and a preliminary association with better results in certification exams (NEJM and AACC).

Adaptive Learning can do the same for your unique healthcare training needs. Download this infographic to learn more.

Dr. Claus W. Biermann, MD, MPH
Executive Vice President
Global Health Care Education
Area9 Lyceum