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Case Study

Published November 2007

Ascension Health Maximizes Blended Learning Approach

  

  Robb Powell

Here’s how learning used to happen at Ascension Health, the nation’s largest nonprofit health system: Three to five weeks before a process’ launch, training staff members would jet around the country, visiting every facility.

At each location, they’d get everybody (ranging from three to 500 people) in an assembly room and demonstrate the new process on a stage for a couple of hours. A few weeks later, the process would go live, and employees would struggle to remember what they’d seen once but never practiced at all.

Then, the process would start anew at the next facility.
There had to be a better way and today, there is. Through a blended approach, Ascension Health now coordinates learning across its 67 hospitals in 20 states. The health system’s learning program still uses traditional, instructor-led classrooms where that format makes sense.

Now, though, these classes are mixed in with online courses, in synchronous and asynchronous formats, and backed by an online resource library, as well as sophisticated testing and tracking.

In the last five years, Ascension Health staffers have completed and tracked more than 3.5 million learning activities online, which never would have been possible the way things used to be. Ascension Health’s 130,000 employees and affiliated clinicians have fundamentally changed the way they share best practices, clinical information, implementation strategies and more.

Progress Toward an Ambitious Goal
Ascension Health’s progress with its enterprise learning program has been a boon to the organization. That’s especially true in light of its ambitious strategic direction, which calls for health care that works, is safe and leaves no one behind. As part of that mission, Ascension Health set a challenging goal: have no preventable injuries or deaths by July 2008.

It’s a sweeping effort at clinical transformation that affects all hospitals and related health facilities within Ascension Health. Areas that must be addressed include culture, infrastructure and collaboration.

The organization identified eight priorities for action, including preventable mortality and areas such as adverse drug events, falls and surgical complications. “Alpha” sites in the system are developing the best clinical and implementation practices. They’re also responsible for training the rest of the organization.

Enterprise learning is playing a vital role in Ascension Health’s quest, enabled by a platform that incorporates SumTotal’s learning management system, which Gradepoint Enterprise Learning has configured for Ascension Health. That platform, known as the managed learning environment (MLE), allows collaboration among clinical leaders on design and implementation of best practices courses, launches and tracks learning programs based on these new protocols, and assesses and measures all organizational learning.

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