University of Minnesota Physicians (M Physicians) is a multi-specialty academic physician practice based in Minneapolis. A few years ago, the practice found its learning management system was actually complicating learning.
Overcoming learning obstacles.
Clinicians and administrative staff could not easily see which courses they needed or enrol in the courses once found. All courses had to be set up by the four-person Learning team, which was overwhelmed by requests, resulting in a month-long backlog.
The time it took to set up an audience, assign a course and provide reporting significantly reduced the resources available to dedicate to creating quality, engaging content.
Now employees can access all required learning and skill development content in one place through Workday Learning.
HRIS/Workday Operations
Labour-intensive compliance management.
As a medical institution, M Physicians has strict guidelines dictating required training. Before Workday, instructors couldn’t track attendance and managers couldn’t readily see what training each employee had completed. The Learning team had to manually collect data from employees in email and compile it in a spreadsheet, taking at least four hours per report. They then sent employees reminder emails to complete the assigned courses.
“We needed a way for our people to create and post content on their own, and for managers to easily access reports and track compliance in real time”, says Brad Aleman, learning partner at M Physicians.
A new way of learning.
Workday Learning provides M Physicians staff and managers with secure access to all learning content in the same interface as other Workday applications. One sign-in allows workers to access everything from new employee onboarding and benefit enrolment to compliance and leadership training.
In addition, Workday Extended Enterprise for Learning allows M Physicians to extend the same training content to its partner organisations as to internal employees. This ensures consistent training and simplifies management for course administrators.
The ability in Workday Learning to pull people out of campaigns was a huge win for us.
Lead Learning Business Partner
Empowering learning administrators.
Campaigns in Workday allow the small Learning team to administer learning for the entire 3,500-person organisation. Administrators can define audience criteria and deliver learning requirements, content and training reminders based on detailed data already in Workday. The system can easily assign learning to a targeted population while filtering out those who have already completed the course or do not need to.
“Before, we might hear from 100 people who got course notifications that weren’t relevant”, says Jason Holmes, lead learning business partner for M Physicians. “The ability in Workday Learning to pull people out of campaigns was a huge win.”
Each employee’s Workday Learning dashboard lists required courses, which they can enrol in with a simple click, and surfaces recommended learning, curated content based on roles or interests, and more. At any time, managers can pull up-to-date reports of their staff’s training status from the compliance dashboard.
Workday Learning also provides standard integrations with external, third-party content providers such as LinkedIn Learning, Skillsoft, Udemy, Harvard ManageMentor and YouTube. This expands the learning content available from within Workday and reduces integration hassles for learning administrators.
We’re using the security in Workday more extensively than a lot of other organisations.
HRIS/Workday Operations
Putting content development in the hands of SMEs.
User-friendly content management tools and robust security make it easy for SMEs to create and post peer-to-peer content in Workday, simplifying and accelerating course development. Configurable approval processes ensure the quality and accuracy of content without intervention from the Learning team.
“We’re using the security in Workday extensively,” says Lisa Umerley, HRIS/Workday Operations at
M Physicians. “It’s not just the default learning administrator roles; it’s all the other administrator, partner and coordinator roles that we allow to transact in the system.”
Achieved 98% completion rate in 30 days.
The Learning team credits automated reminders, compliance dashboard tracking, custom messaging and ease of enrolment in Workday Learning with helping it achieve a 98 percent completion rate in its 2019 HIPAA training within 30 days of launch. Before deploying the application, M Physicians only achieved an 80 percent completion rate in the same time period.
Staff licenses and certifications are automatically uploaded into Workday. This drives alerts and creates mailing lists for campaigns, notifying staff of courses needed for certification. Now it takes just 20 minutes to create a completion report, compared to 4 hours previously.
Now I record the coder training live and upload it to Workday so coders can review it when they have time.
Senior Billing Manager
Accelerates peer-to-peer learning.
Workday Learning has accelerated the creation of peer-to-peer training content. Clinical heads of departments can record specialists’ presentations and upload them to Workday for staff who weren’t able to attend. The same goes for administrative SMEs.
“I used to present ‘coder brown bags’ in person, with many coders attending via Skype”, says Cara Detlefsen, senior billing manager. “Now I record the coder training live and upload it to Workday so coders can review it when they have time.” Decentralising peer-to-peer content posting has cut the turnaround time from a month to as little as a day.
Workday helped us move to a monthly required learning format that allows employees to consume content in bits.
HRIS/Workday Operations
Anywhere, anytime access to learning.
Rapid changes in the clinical setting require getting new learning to the staff fast. Clinicians are constantly moving from patient to patient, so they rely on their mobile devices rather than a computer. With Workday Learning, the staff can access content and courses from anywhere on their mobile devices.
“Workday helped us move to a monthly required learning format that allows employees to consume content in bits – one topic at a time, typically in 10 to 30 minutes”, says Umerley. “Now they can access all required learning and skill development content in one interface through Workday Learning.”