Situation

Woman's Hospital in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is a 225-bed, private, not-for-profit organization and one of the largest women’s specialty hospitals in the United States. We are recognized throughout the country for our innovative programs for women and their families, and we work to use our resources as effectively as possible as we provide specialized care for women of all ages.

We needed a cost-effective way to provide essential product training to new staff, as well as to provide our nurses with ongoing high-quality continuing education.

Approach

Woman's Hospital uses the HospitalDirect tab available through our HealthStream Learning Center to connect our staff with essential product training as well as complimentary continuing education (CE). The HospitalDirect tab has a combination of online courseware, resources, testing, evaluation, distribution and reporting tools that enable us to deliver product training as well as provide high-quality continuing education courses to our staff. One benefit that we liked a lot was the ability to provide detailed report on course utilization and evaluation by course, facility, and job role.

Woman's Hospital chose to make the Essentials of IV Therapy modules available to staff through HospitalDirect and actually incorporated those courses into our nursing orientation program. We use the product courses from Baxter on their infusion pumps as an essential training resources for new staff and for those who miss the initial in-service training.

As a side note that shows the value of these courses, they were actually unavailable for a period of time while they were undergoing re-accreditation and it became acutely apparent that having these courses inactive was a major loss for us, both in terms of training for our nurses and their getting CE credits. Both HealthStream and the grant fund provider were great to work with in ensuring this process happened as quickly as possible.

Results

Woman's Hospital reduced both our training time and travel expense. We are also able to ensure that our staff continues to receive consistent training, regardless of when and where the training is received. Increased contract compliance through consistent and always-available training means we meet Joint Commission requirements effectively. We definitely benefit from receiving automatic feedback, which gives us guidance for the continuous improvement that is part of our mission.

"The courses in HealthStream's HospitalDirect tab are awesome.  We do utilize some of the CE credit, but our main purpose is to teach our staff, which ultimately benefits our patients."