HealthStream Competency Center Customer Spotlight: Kettering Health Network

— Annette Dailey, Learning System Manager

Impact

Kettering Health Network was facing several challenges, including effectively managing employee competencies, standardizing its education program, improving HCAHPS scores, minimizing training inefficiencies, and improving its accreditation process. Since partnering with HealthStream, Kettering has pursued multiple solutions and, as a result, experienced these improvements:

• Standardized education for all 12,000 employees across the company to improve patient outcomes, improve employee satisfaction, and become fiscally efficient with learning resources.
• Affected immediate upward impact on HCAHPS scores, which are expected to continue to rise over time. The overall rating of the hospital Increased by 4%, discharge information increased by 3%, and hospital cleanliness and quietness increased by 7%.
• Reduced over-training and redundant training for interdepartmental staff transfers.
• Increased staff satisfaction through greater availability of expanded electronic CEU offerings and a new standardized course format.
• Created greater efficiencies through better utilization of educators and training resources.
• Created cost savings of $751,766 over three years related to BLS and ACLS.
• Saved an estimated 300+ hours in Healthcare Facilities Accreditation Program surveys compared to using the old, pre-HealthStream way of tracking training hours.

Background

Kettering Health Network (KHN) is a not-for-profit network of seven hospitals, eight emergency rooms, and more than 75 outpatient facilities in Southwest Ohio and Northern Cincinnati. From maternity care and state- of-the art cancer fighting technology to heart care and senior living, Kettering Health Network serves people at every stage of life. KHN has a total of 1,600 beds and 12,000 active employees. For the past three years, Kettering Health Network has been named a Top 10 healthcare system in the nation by Thomson Reuters. The Kettering Health Network’s mission is to improve the quality of life of the people in the communities it serves through healthcare and education.

Challenge

When Kettering Health Network contacted HealthStream, they faced multiple training and management issues that are often common to large, diverse healthcare networks. The old system was very inconsistent between departments and exposed the company to risk by under-training in some areas and creating inefficiencies by overtraining in other areas. “Several years ago, we were all separate healthcare facilities, and we had evolved into Kettering Health Network. All departments had a best-training practice, but we were challenged with moving to one best evidence-based practice,” said Annette Dailey, Learning System Manager.

Although their overall primary need was a comprehensive, interactive learning system, Kettering faced other specific, system-wide challenges, including:

• Regulatory surveys had identified deficits in education, competency management, and records.
• Individual facilities had their own home-grown, specialized testing centers, which did not meet the needs of the entire organization and exposed it to risk. Policy and procedures were not integrated with the testing center. Also, live BLS and ACLS classes existed throughout the facilities without a tracking mechanism in place, which consumed many hours on the schedule of every educator and instructor.
• Education departments in all facilities worked independently without a standardized communication network or reporting ability and spent considerable resources developing, building, and updating entire curricula, often with redundancies while many sites struggled with limited reporting capability and access. Also, testing centers were not accessible to employees or managers working from home.
• CE units for respiratory, pharmacy, OT/PT, and nursing could not be offered or tracked, so training had to be delivered offsite.
• No standard, uniform on-boarding process existed for new employees.

“Just our overall mandatory education, that was a huge risk for us... not having a standardized process and not being able to pull at a minute’s notice what our compliance was. HealthStream has helped us to do that,” added Dailey.

Results

Kettering Health Network chose HealthStream’s Learning Center as a partner for learning management, and then built on that initial success by expanding to several other HealthStream solutions in order to leverage their resources.

“In the beginning, we started with the HealthStream Learning Center, but as a network, we wanted to move it to the next level and we brought on the Competency Center, Lippincott, and HeartCode,” said Dailey.

By partnering with HealthStream to create a technology- based, system-wide training network, Kettering reaped process improvements and efficiencies of scale. HealthStream fulfilled Kettering’s need for better documentation and reporting, as well as its requirement for better needs-based training with a requirement for standardized staff competency training to increase HCAHPS scores. Most importantly, due to training improvements, staff now spends less time off the floor, away from patients.

HealthStream’s Learning Management System and associated platforms have supported Kettering’s move toward one best practice across the network, as well as its creation of the Kettering Center for Nursing Excellence (CFNE). By integrating several HealthStream tools across its network of facilities, Kettering cut costs, increased employee satisfaction, met accreditation needs, and improved patient care.

“I find in working with HealthStream in our partnership, it’s the innovation, the caring that I see, and it’s the collaborative relationship with HealthStream that is special,” said Dailey.