The Future of Healthcare Learning: Innovation and Interoperability

Healthcare learning is entering a transformative era, driven by cutting-edge technologies and innovative platforms that are reshaping education and training. At the same time, the healthcare sector is also evolving rapidly, with the demands of a diverse workforce, advancements in technology, and an ever-present focus on improving patient outcomes.

At the forefront of both these evolutions are Learning Experience Platforms (LXPs), which have emerged as a key tool to address the healthcare industry’s most pressing challenges by providing personalized, accessible, and efficient learning solutions to a diverse audience of learners. What’s more, as LXPs are poised to harness the power of artificial intelligence, virtual reality and augmented reality technologies, they’re also poised to revolutionize healthcare education by creating immersive, personalized learning environments that enable hands-on practice, improve knowledge retention, and enhance the overall training experience for healthcare professionals.

To better understand this healthcare learning transformation, we turned to Kevin O’Hara, HealthStream’s Senior Vice President, Platform Solutions and Product Strategy. Keep reading for his insights into how LXPs are shaping the future of healthcare education, their benefits for a diverse healthcare workforce, and their potential to transform the healthcare industry.

Addressing a Multigenerational Workforce

Healthcare organizations face the unique challenge of catering to a workforce that spans multiple generations. With the median age of nurses in the United States at 46 and one in six U.S. nurses being foreign-born, strategies to engage learners must accommodate a wide range of preferences, says O’Hara, who emphasizes the importance of diversity beyond age.

“We think about diversity on a range of dimensions: how people like to learn; the stage of their career; what they want from their job or career; their experiences at work,” O’Hara said. “All of these dimensions of diversity can vary at any age.”

He notes that as HealthStream has been architecting their own LXP, the HealthStream Learning Experience, they've prioritized offering enabling technologies that facilitate customers’ ability to present a range of learning experiences that fit the needs of their particular workforce. “We like to stay on the leading edge of new types of learning experiences, but we also know that many of the ways we have learned for a long time are still valuable and still the best fit for some people,” he says. “Our goal is to make it easy for our customers to deliver learning experiences in a range of modalities and for their learners to access and engage with those experiences.”

By offering a variety of learning options, today’s LXPs ensure that every healthcare professional can access training in their preferred format, whether through traditional methods or modern digital tools.

The Role of AI in Healthcare Learning

AI has become a cornerstone of modern LXPs, enhancing their ability to deliver personalized learning experiences. According to O’Hara, AI’s most significant impact is improving content discoverability and learner engagement, boosted by the rise of large language models (LLM) and generative AI.

“There are many features of an LXP that can benefit from the use of AI, and these benefits have only expanded in the last few years,” he says. “The most common uses of AI in LXPs relate to the discoverability of the best-fit content.”

O'Hara explains that this happens primarily through LLM-powered search and AI-powered recommendations. LLMs help interpret natural language search and provide better matching to learning experiences through natural language matching to metadata. LXPs can also use AI to match learners to other learners like them.

“Once matched, a learner can benefit from what has worked for those other learners,” he says.

AI also stands to streamline the work of training content creators and curators, making it easier to create collections of content or intelligent learning pathways.

Interoperability in Healthcare Education

Interoperability—the seamless exchange of data between systems—is a critical consideration in healthcare education. For O’Hara, it’s about enabling learners to maintain a comprehensive transcript of all the learning experiences with which they’ve engaged.” Interoperability also means that healthcare professionals can maintain a repository of their professional licenses and certifications, education, and work history.

“When it comes to AI, more data is usually better,” O’Hara explains. “Just like a patient’s electronic health record, having all of this data moving with the healthcare professional creates a holistic view of their professional development.”

Through integration and interoperability, LXPs can help organizations provide better training and career advancement recommendations for their healthcare workers.

A (Slowly) Transforming Landscape

The healthcare education landscape has evolved significantly over the past five years, and O’Hara points to the innovations in this article as key drivers of change. However, he also acknowledges that progress in healthcare and education tends to be slower than in other sectors.

“Learning involves knowledge, skill, and judgment, and it is hard to rush any of those things,” he says. “We have worked throughout the healthcare education community to find new, more efficient and effective ways to learn, but most of the gains have been on the margins. But with AI beginning to make a big difference, LXPs are perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the AI revolution. I think five years from now, we will have adopted AI in a way that will make healthcare education highly personalized, highly efficient and effective, and many of these gains will be realized through interfaces like LXPs.”

The Road Ahead

The HealthStream Learning Experience is the only healthcare-specific LXP currently on the market, designed to meet the industry’s unique needs.

“It is very different for a database administrator to want to become a full-stack developer in a tech company than it is for a patient care assistant to want to become an OR nurse in a hospital,” O’Hara says. “An LXP can’t treat these career paths as similar. And the tools needed to present them to employees and move employees through them must be different to be effective.”

Additionally, healthcare is a highly regulated field, with care delivered by various roles with strict licensure and certification requirements. Adding to this complexity is the reality that there are shortages in many of these roles.

“Being able to account for all of this in an LXP is essential,” O’Hara says. “And it’s one of the reasons you might see other LXPs fail at healthcare organizations.”

The HealthStream Learning Experience is currently in pilot phases with two major partners and is set for general availability in early 2025.

“We don’t have outcome data yet, but all the early feedback says it is just the right tool for the job,” O’Hara says.