The Problem With Pretests in Healthcare Compliance

So, you want to provide instructor-led healthcare compliance training. You provide a pretest because you want to make sure that your employees have some background knowledge before they take the training. Or maybe if they pass the pretest, they don’t have to take the training at all.

The above scenario is a common tactic of traditional corporate learning. But there’s one big problem with it: one of your employees scores 95% on the pretest. And that’s great because now you can assume that they know 95% of the course. They no longer have to take the training. They’re probably happy they don’t have to sit through another training course. And now your business doesn’t have to pay for them to attend. 

But if an employee gets 95% on a pretest, there’s still the 5% of the test that they failed. In a field like healthcare compliance, that 5% that the learner does not know could result in a lawsuit, malpractice, or even death. So what do you do?

For traditional corporate learning you previously had two options:

1. The employee doesn’t have to attend the course and you never teach them that 5% that they don’t know.
2. They attend the course and you waste their time (and your business’s money) teaching them the 95% they do know. Also, the employee is so frustrated and bored by having to sit through that previously known 95% that they become unengaged with the training and now there’s a good chance they missed the 5% they were there to learn.

How Adaptive Learning Fixes the Healthcare Compliance Pretest

We all agree it is a good idea not to make employees learn material they already know. But it’s a danger to miss out on being able to assess exactly how much they know, how much they “guessed right”, and where to draw the line on whether the employees know enough.

Adaptive Learning adjusts to the individual needs of every learner, providing corporate e-learning at scale. Through a learner’s continual self-assessment, the learning management system (LMS) is able to further adjust and individualize to every learner’s unique needs.

The personalized learning system only shows a learner the content they need to know. Learners no longer waste time sitting through training that is unengaging, and they learn faster - up to 50% faster. 

Unconscious incompetence, or not knowing what you don’t know, is especially dangerous for healthcare compliance because it results in mistakes. Adaptive Learning identifies and corrects unconscious incompetence, so mistakes are fewer. 

Consider providing a one-hour compliance course to 10,000 employees; that’s 10,000 hours employees spend training. But when those employees learn up to 50% faster, that training time is cut in half. Adaptive Learning gives back 5000 hours - or two and half years - of productivity to the business. And the business is assured that learners know 100% of the learning content and not a percentage less. Adaptive Learning also makes sure every element of knowledge can be assessed in a way that does not allow the learner to “guess lucky” or to forget critical concepts.

So, when your employee takes a pretest and receives a score of 95%, an Adaptive Learning training course teaches them that 5% that they need to know.

Adaptive Learning Mitigates Risk

If you’re interested in learning how your corporate e-learning can mitigate risk for your business and improve compliance training, download this E-book.