Business Challenge
Creating a modern, flexible learning ecosystem requires patience, communication, and a clear plan for success. And that’s exactly what the Talent Technologies & Creative Solutions team at CHRISTUS Health had when they set out to create a world-class talent development ecosystem.
The team, which has about 15 members, had an overall goal to replace the LMS and create a learning ecosystem that:
- better meets the needs of learners,
- better utilizes a large quantity of unused learning content, and
- provides streamlined reporting to leaders.
They also wanted to focus on becoming a High Reliability Organization (HRO)—an initiative that strives to achieve zero harm to patients and associates. The organization, however, was challenged with dated systems and not being able to easily share content directly with busy associates—both of which were preventing CHRISTUS from becoming an HRO.
The team needed to design a flexible ecosystem and integration process that would receive the support of not only HR and IT leadership, but also the Nurse Executive Council—which historically considered system changes as major disruptions to the organization.
To achieve all of their goals, the team needed to:
- identify a larger organization initiative to bolt onto,
- acquire buy-in across departments by sourcing technology that would address their pain points, and
- map a two-year rollout plan.
The Solution
CHRISTUS developed a learning experience platform (LXP) called Genesis—which is the organization's one-stop learning portal that helps accelerate clinical and professional development whenever, wherever. The delivery of the Genesis Program has two access points:
- Learner development (content access)
- Learning team visibility and agility (data access)
To secure funding for a digital transformation of this scale, the L&D team assessed which areas of the organization had business needs that could be most impacted while mitigating disruptions to the rest of the organization. The team uncovered that the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) tool, managed by IT, required training and would serve as a critical starting point to provide training, show results, and expand impact across the organization.
The Approach
In order to minimize disruption to the organization, the integration and delivery rollout happened in six phases developed by a Tiger Team. While the Talent Technologies & Creative Solutions team worked on connecting the ERP, EMR, LXP, and LRS integration was mapped into an ecosystem vision and scoped to align with CHRISTUS’s strategic goals.
To receive the highest fidelity of data from their various systems, CHRISTUS opted to build an xAPI-centric ecosystem, with Watershed’s learning record store as the data hub. The LRS—which acts as the command center for the learning team to analyze and evaluate data from various systems—met a strict set of requirements, most heavily focused on data handling and visualization capabilities that provide:
- Management of multiple activity providers directly in the UI and via API to easily create/update/delete and limit access of systems
- Automatic import, process, clean and transformation of data from xAPI, non-xAPI systems, CSVs and custom connectors with the option for active synchronization
- Analytics/reporting and visualization
- Reporting on complex aggregations of statements with the ability to scale to millions of statements
- Robust filtered reports and visualization options for both technical and non-technical users
- A variety of visualization options, permissions, shareability, and configuration
So whether it’s for reporting, onboarding, connecting with thought leaders, or clinical education needs—L&D can now connect and learn in one place. Learners access Genesis’ video, gaming, social, assessment, and talent resources through a single front end provided by the LXP. This uniform experience provides learners frictionless access, while Talent Development has access to reporting on these various systems via xAPI, reflected in the LRS (Watershed).
The Results
The Talent Technologies & Creative Solutions team can now see how Genesis promotes self-directed learning and professional development. Comparison data between the previous ecosystem and the new Genesis ecosystem shows that associates are consuming 40 percent more elective learning than before. And the team can continue to track these metrics to ensure they are meeting the associates’ learning needs.
The team achieved 100 percent of associates trained by FY19, and validated during FY20 that Associates are using these universal skills to reduce errors and speak up for safety. The exact percentages are confidential, but a welcome improvement.
Thanks to Genesis, learners can now include comments in the learning content—and the team is seeing a lot of positive feedback. This social feature also is a good tool to know if something in Genesis isn’t working correctly. Ultimately, this feature creates a better overall experience for everyone. The team also can see what leaders are consuming and re-consuming, and show leadership what associates are using and recommending.
And as a result of their work around Genesis, CHRISTUS received a silver Brandon Hall Group award for Best Advance in Learning Technology Implementation in 2020.
Moving forward, the team’s focus is on having Genesis recommend content based on what learners say about themselves and the skills they need. And the data “behind the scenes” will help push the right content to the right audience.
