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Continuing education is crucial in the healthcare industry to keep up with new technology, research, treatment best practices, and changing regulations. Whether professionals want to gain new skills to further their careers or need to maintain their current certifications, it’s important to have options available that make it easy to learn, even with busy schedules.
A learning management system (LMS) for healthcare is software that can help in that process. An LMS for healthcare provides a learning system that’s built with continuing medical education (CME) in mind to make it easy for professionals to learn and for associations to deliver impactful content.
Healthcare LMSs are also increasingly integrated into academic environments, such as an undergraduate medical informatics course, to expose students to modern digital training tools.
What is a healthcare LMS and how does it work? Read on for all the details.
What Is a Learning Management System?
An LMS is software that’s designed to deliver, manage, and track educational content. These systems are used by many professional associations, nonprofits, workplaces, and other educational providers to make learning materials more accessible in an online interface.
LMSs often provide tools to build a step-by-step learning process that’s easy to follow, with tools to assess learner knowledge throughout the course.
What Is an LMS in Healthcare?
A healthcare LMS is software designed specifically for healthcare organizations and associations to deliver relevant learning materials. It’s built with CME in mind with features that help maintain compliance, report to major accrediting bodies, and provide medical professionals with the tools they need to learn effectively. These platforms can also track medical students usage data to help institutions tailor educational strategies.
How Does a Healthcare LMS Differ From a General LMS?
Many systems offer interactive simulations to reinforce clinical skills in real-world scenarios.
Some of the common benefits you’ll get with a healthcare LMS that general LMSs don’t always offer are:
- Automated reporting and certification tracking with major accrediting organizations, such as ACCME or CE Broker.
- Support for multimedia content and simulation-based learning, since healthcare training programs often require more interactivity.
- Features to assist with compliance, such as customized reports and automated certification enrollments, that help meet strict requirements.
Why Do Healthcare Organizations Need Specialized LMS Software?
Healthcare organizations need systems with specialized features to help standardize education, make it accessible, and ensure they meet compliance demands.
Healthcare LMSs are designed to make that possible. There’s a growing demand for flexible and mobile learning while still ensuring professionals gain all the valuable skills they need from CME courses, so associations delivering educational content should look for the right tools to ensure it’s as effective as possible. By offering mobile accessibility and frequent content refreshes, these platforms help professionals stay up to date with industry advancements.
What Key Features Should a Healthcare Learning Management System Include?
Some of the most important features to look for in LMSs for healthcare are:
- Integration and automated reporting with major accreditation organizations, such as ACCME, JA PARS, CPE Monitor, and CE Broker.
- Reporting and analytics to get insights into training effectiveness and learner progress.
- An accessible interface with mobile access available so professionals can learn from anywhere.
- Customization and content creation tools that help you tailor content to professional learning needs, including interactive features and multimedia content options.
- A scalable system that helps you create a full course library and continue to add new members.
Our EthosCE healthcare LMS at Cadmium offers each of these features and more to help healthcare organizations and associations build an efficient system and provide continuous learning opportunities to their members.
How Does a Healthcare LMS Handle Compliance Training and Regulations?
Healthcare LMSs can’t guarantee compliance, but they can provide you with tools to help adhere to strict compliance regulations. Some of the top features that can help include:
- A system that makes it easy to update content to provide the latest information
- Automated notifications, enrollment, and tracking to help professionals stay on top of certification maintenance
- Generating comprehensive audit reports
- Analytics to track learners’ progress
- The ability to offer accessible and standardized training so your team adheres to current regulations
What Types of Continuing Education Credits Can a Healthcare LMS Manage?
A healthcare LMS can help manage many types of continuing education credits, such as:
- Continuing medical education (CME)
- Continuing nursing education (CNE)
- Continuing pharmacy education (CPE)
- Along with many other professional credits and training resources, such as mental health or physical therapy
Medical organizations can also use it for internal training, such as for HIPAA regulations or safety training.
How Do Healthcare Professionals Benefit From Learning Management Systems?
Medical professionals benefit from LMSs in many ways. That includes one of the most important things for healthcare workers – providing the best possible patient care. When professionals gain new skills, such as learning how to use new technology effectively or operate more efficiently, they can make patient experiences better and improve lives.
Additionally, medical professionals can use continuing education to grow their careers, such as obtaining a certification or skills that make them eligible for a higher role or more responsibility.
Lastly, it offers a flexible way to learn when professionals have busy schedules and long days at work. It can be hard to feel up to making it to in-person training consistently after long shifts, so having online training available makes it a lot easier for professionals to fit learning into their days and commit to it.
What Should Healthcare Organizations Look For When Choosing an LMS?
Features that healthcare providers and associations should look for in an LMS are:
- Automated reporting to accrediting organizations, such as JA PARS or CPE Monitor, to help with certification maintenance
- A system that’s easy to use and customize with a minimal learning curve
- Integrations with the software you use, such as your association management system (AMS) or customer relationship management (CRM) software
- Reporting and analytics to track learner progress and compliance needs
- Security and reliability, given the sensitive nature of healthcare data
- Full content management with options for multimedia learning
- Scalability to support a large number of users and courses
How Does a Healthcare LMS Integrate With Other Management Systems?
Healthcare LMSs will typically integrate with other management systems using data synchronization or application programming interfaces (APIs). If you’re looking into our EthosCE LMS at Cadmium and aren’t sure how it’ll integrate with the tools you use, our team can help walk you through it and ensure you have everything you need.
How Does Healthcare LMS Support Blended Learning and Clinical Education?
Some LMSs can help with more than just online courses. They may also provide blended options where you can integrate online learning with in-person training or workshops. Many organizations get great results by offering a set of online modules with an optional hands-on workshop where members can apply what they learned.
Our solutions at Cadmium can help with this. Our EthosCE healthcare LMS integrates with the other software we offer, such as our Eventscribe event management system and Warpwire livestreaming solution. That way, you can work with your team to plan live workshops and training events, integrate them into your courses, and also livestream them for those who can’t attend in person.
It creates a well-rounded solution to provide different ways to engage your members and help them learn and apply skills effectively.
Why EthosCE Is a Top Choice
EthosCE, Cadmium’s LMS built for healthcare providers, is designed for healthcare associations and organizations providing continuing education. In addition to integrating with our other solutions, it offers many features that help organizations provide impactful learning solutions, including:
- Automatic reporting and certification tracking
- Full course management and customizability
- Detailed reporting and analytics to support compliance needs
- Scalability to create a comprehensive course library
- An accessible interface that’s easy to navigate
- Automated notifications and interactive features to keep learners engaged
- And more
Want to see how EthosCE can make a difference for you? Click here to learn more.
