Alfred Health

The Challenge

After having successfully implemented Totara in 2016, a new challenge came in 2018 with the introduction of a full enterprise wide Electronic Medical Record (EMR) to transition from the existing system to an integrated electronic clinical information system which is critical to the future direction of the organisation and has a strong focus on patient safety.

Everything from patient admission to drug prescriptions and patient observations such as temperature and blood pressure are all directly entered into the EMR system. This required training over 7,000 clinical staff in the use of the new software, complex biomedical devices and relearning processes around patient interaction associated with the EMR. This needed to be accomplished in a very short timeframe of 10 weeks.

As Alfred Health's Learning Systems Lead, explains, “There was huge pressure to provide high-quality training to a large number of staff in the most efficient way possible given the limited timeframe. We had to think outside the box in how we leveraged various features in the LMS to support staff through this time.

It was a daunting piece of work given the scope of the project but we believed could meet the brief, particularly as we had just migrated to Totara Learn which had expanded functionality.”

The Solution

The LEX system supporting education for the EMR project

The LMS is integrated with both the IT and HR systems and leveraging this data, the LMS team were able to identify various discipline groups throughout the organisation which were then coordinated to facilitate interdisciplinary training for the project. Staff were trained in a cascade with a small group of super-users who then trained other staff with a combination of training types across many locations. Subsequent dynamic enrolments were used to allocate online and face to face training based on discipline area and whether they were inpatient or outpatient based.

Tracking and managing trainer allocation was further enhanced by adding them as ‘assets’ in the system giving the ability to check against room availability for timetabling and rostering purposes which had the additional challenge of negotiating room availability during concurrent site wide building works.

In addition to managing room bookings the Totara system supported tracking of facilitators and rooms to ensure availability and identify potential clashes. Given the challenge the project team had in managing staff rosters with normal shift work in addition to the new training, the LMS helped to streamline many of these tasks.