Turn back time a few rotations around the sun and it would take 13 years to sequence your DNA. Your out-of-pocket cost for it would land somewhere around the $1 billion mark. Today, the same can be done in under an hour, for less than $100.
Health Tech, which services this industry, is constantly evolving. Blink and you’ll nearly miss advancements like 3D printed implants printed on-demand, biometric devices that offer continuous and uninterrupted health monitoring, and yes – even personalized care that’s geared specifically to your individual DNA.
Keeping their customers up with those shifts is one goal that education within health tech organizations strives to attain, but there’s more to the picture than that. Let’s dive in.
What is Health Tech?
The World Health Organization defines Health Tech as “the application of organized knowledge and skills in the form of devices, medicines, vaccines, procedures and systems developed to solve a health problem and improve quality of lives.” This definition creates a very broad category, which deserves a little framing before we go any further.
The ecosystem is a large one, encompassing emerging spaces such as electronic GP record systems, medical appliances, medical computer softwares, apps available for accessing a GP via video call, electronic assistive tech, AI powered drug discovery, nano-medicine, medical robotics, neurotechnology, and much more. Ultimately, health tech organizations strive to support medical professionals and improve patient experiences and outcomes with technology, though each has a different specialty and approach.
Research shows digital-first services are increasing in demand, especially as patients are becoming more enthusiastic about the convenience of care delivered via virtual channels. That’s an important consideration as Health Tech is becoming increasingly embedded into medical professionals’ practices and their everyday interactions with patients.
With this growing trend, health tech organizations have an opportunity to provide education to their customers in order to allow healthcare staff and healthcare organizations to stay up-to-date when it comes to the latest technology, processes and techniques, and simultaneously increase product adoption and customer success.
Why Health Tech Education Needs are Different
Health tech moves quickly. It grows quickly, too. According to a recent study by Global Industry Analysts Inc, the global digital health market which was estimated at US$152.5 Billion in the year 2020 is set to grow rapidly and reach 456.9 billion by 2026.
Its learning needs are growing just as fast:
- Training: With technology evolving rapidly – and regulations changing with them – medical organizations and practitioners need to remain as up-to-date as humanly possible. Training might be as basic as learning how to use a specific system you provide, and as complicated as learning specialized medical procedures utilizing your products.
- Compliance: If your products deal with personal health information, you’ll need to make sure they are being used by your customers in a manner that is compliant with HIPAA, GDPR or PIPEDA. OSHA and other regulations may apply as well depending on the nature of your business and products.
- Education: Learning initiatives might involve teaching your customers new procedures or orienting them to a lab; upskilling specialists on niche knowledge and practices, and keeping practitioners in-the-know about current trends.
- Customer Onboarding: In an industry where there isn’t much room for error, new users of your product need to start on the right foot by learning the correct use, best practices and processes of your product from day one. Activating your customers faster through education will not only benefit them but will also help increase product adoption and reduce customer churn.
In the past, these functions have been left up to in-person classes, paper documentation or a mish-mash of videos. But these more traditional approaches to educating customers within the rapidly evolving health tech space can be difficult when information, technologies, processes, and treatment change as quickly as they do today.
6 Must-Haves for a Health Tech Organization LMS
That’s where a learning management system, or an LMS, can help your health tech organization the most. Think of an LMS as a single source of customizable online learning that includes courses, resources, testing and analytics. An LMS makes it easy for you to create, administer and manage learning content for your customers.
But there’s more to the story than that for health tech organizations. In this industry, these six features are nothing short of essential:
1. Accessibility
Educating your customers such as medical practitioners and healthcare staff is particularly challenging when they spend most of their time on their feet. Many run on 24/7 schedules. So setting aside an hour at a predetermined time to attend a training or learn new information? It’s harder than you’d think. An LMS provides your learners with the opportunity to access training, no matter where they are, when they have time to spare.
2. Responsiveness
Think of how quickly COVID-19 affected daily practice – and how important responding rapidly was in curbing its spread. A strong healthcare LMS allows for simple and responsive updates in course creation and subsequent management.
3. Complexity
Healthcare and health tech education spans many specializations and in-depth knowledge that takes years of targeted learning to acquire. There may also be many roles across a healthcare organization, with different learning goals. Your LMS needs to effectively manage both breadth and depth of informing your customers on your product, best practices, and services.
4. Simplicity
At the same time, your LMS needs to be easy to use. While your customers may be healthcare experts, they may not be technology experts. Having a simple interface makes it easy for learners to find the courses and resources they need. That can make the difference between enthusiastic adoption and no one clicking and engaging with your content.
5. Scalability
Traditional training doesn’t scale well. As your customer base grows, you will need more instructors, more conference rooms, more binders. All of this costs more, too, in terms of time, dollars and hassle. An LMS gives you the tools you need to spread knowledge without biting off more than you can chew.
6. Security
An LMS with features like encryption, endpoint protection, Single Sign-On OpenID and enterprise-grade support service-level agreements helps you keep your sensitive data secure whether it’s in transit or at rest.
Health Tech Education in Action
Selecting an LMS is one thing – after all, there are hundreds of options to choose from. That’s a decision that’ll require a robust team, including your customer success team who understand your customers’ learning goals, your IT experts who know the technical requirements and infrastructure, and compliance or legal experts who can help gauge if the platform meets your organization’s regulatory standards.
Once you’ve decided on the right LMS for your health tech organization, you’ll need to roll it out. That process will take the help of your customer success team who can help define what learning is needed, instructors who will make the courses come to life, and communications to get the word out.
Your LMS provider can help take the hassle out of your roll-out. In our own experience, our support staff has helped health tech organizations build learning from the ground up in as few as two weeks.
Sounds great – we know! But there are other benefits too:
- Cost savings: Without the need for classroom learning and live instructors, you can roll out learning to as many customers as you need to – without draining your budget.
- Greater reach: You can educate customers around the world, in multiple languages, all from one platform. With community-building and sharing capabilities, you can help your content spread even faster.
- Immediate analysis: Do more of what’s working (and less of what isn’t) with real-time analytics that show how your customers are progressing in and completing their courses.
- Learning retention: There’s a lot to remember in healthcare – and much of it is complicated – including many health tech products. Learning retention improves when your LMS allows learners to progress at their own pace and revisit material they may have missed.
No industry is quite like health tech. That means no organization’s education needs are quite like yours, either. With the ability to create dynamic courses, live lessons, assignments, certificates, quizzes and more, Thinkific Plus provides healthcare organizations with the tools they need to educate healthcare staff and the people they serve easily… and effectively.
Want to see Thinkific Plus in action? Check out how IntelyCare was able to award 200,000 COVID-19 nurse training certificates within 10 days. Or how the Mohammed Bin Rashid University of Medicine and Health Sciences took COVID-19 training viral with a community ambassador program that educated more than 940,000 people around the world.
