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6 must-have features every post-acute care LMS needs for streamlined compliance and education delivery

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The world of post-acute care comes with its own unique challenges. Every week your organization is onboarding dozens, if not hundreds, of new workers with various disciplines in many departments. Managers and admins have to work together, sometimes manually, to ensure every employee is ready for work. This can be a long and grueling process, especially when you oversee many locations or regions. But we know compliance can’t be taken lightly and state regulations can be intense. And to add pressure (not that you need it) auditors and surveyors always seem to be lurking about.

It’s one hurdle after another, is your Learning Management System (LMS) helping or hindering the way you track, manage and deliver learning to your organization? Every LMS is expected to deliver content, but what else do you need?

In this article, we have outlined the 6 features every post-acute care facility needs in their LMS.  

1. A no-training needed LMS software

Like any tool, a LMS is useless unless users know how to leverage it. Without proper knowledge or training in the platform, users can easily miss deadlines and fail to complete assignments. Instead of having to waste time training employees to use a new and confusing technology, you can provide a platform that’s easy enough for anyone to use – without training: one click launches, easy to navigate dashboards, prominently placed deadlines, etc.

Another offering to consider that falls in line with having an easy-to-use platform is mobile app availability. To accommodate your always on-the-go workforce, can your learning be accessed anywhere, anytime? A platform that is easy to navigate on any device can help your workers stay compliant and prepared to deliver care.  

Separate from your learners, LMS admins may struggle with managing certifications, assignments by role or location, or report building. What kind of resources are offered to help admins streamline and scale their operations? While some LMS platforms offer support during the onboarding process, many resources tend to fade once onboarding has settled. Your LMS is a partner, and you need ongoing support regardless of when your organization or workflow changes.

2. An intuitive interface to automate your processes

There’s a lot to keep up with when it comes to healthcare regulations. State requirements are very particular and can vary by role. Now layer in the constantly changing employees due to high turnover, even with an ever-shifting workforce you are responsible for ensuring every employee is compliant. If your system isn’t intuitive for these changes, well – let's just say it can be a real pain in the LMS. It becomes someone’s job to manually ensure policies and procedures are met and the correct training is being assigned to learners.  

Your LMS needs to automatically provide personalized learning based on discipline, care setting and/or location. Having a platform that gives you the ability to assign in a better way helps to ensure you are getting the right education to the right person at the right time.

3. LMS Multi-tenancy that allows flexibility for each tenant

Standardization is important but so is autonomy. Not only is it important for your organization to have an unlimited number of admins in your LMS, but each admin needs access to a range of controls. Multi-tenancy goes beyond visibility and automatic deployment and basic reporting. You need a system that offers top level (super-administrator) control while giving your local sites autonomy to deliver, track and manage education how they best see fit. Learn more about multi-tenancy here.  

4. Compatibility with any content provider or content type

You need a system that allows for a friendly upload of your own content or content that you buy from another provider. This seems like a no brainer, but many LMS platforms will not allow content from competitors to be hosted in their learning platform. They want you to buy and use solely the content that they produce. This has become a problem for healthcare organizations because of the need for a wide range of specific content. This limits LMS choices to only providers who carry the required content. You need a flexible and agnostic medium that allows self-authored or purchased content.

5. Accurate and real-time certification management

In order to remain compliant with industry standards (and avoid those pesky fines that come with non-compliance), accurate certification management is necessary. Some LMS platforms don’t allow for the automation of certificates. Can your LMS assign certifications to a group of employees at once? Easy certification creation and deployment can help streamline operations and take some of the heavy lifting from your LMS administrators or super-admin. Not to mention, easy automation and customizable reporting can come in handy when those surveyors or auditors come around.  

6. Frictionless and limitless integration capabilities

Post- acute care facilities’ LMS platforms are plagued with limitations of data imports and exports. It’s important that your LMS carries over all employee HRIS data; name, DOB, title, location, employment status, etc. If your LMS limits employee data fields, it becomes hard to assign users training based on the information you have in the system. Lack of imported field data forces your team to manually sort and input the missing data fields for every employee, across every location. Who has time for that?

Complete visibility of employee data is critical for understanding your workforce at a high level.

In addition to core employee data fields, you also need access to other details: secondary job title, supervisor, job function, to name a few. Without all the information available, it’s nearly impossible to create efficient training plans. When it comes time to shop for a new LMS, there's a lot to consider. Hopefully the 6 features we’ve outlined can help you make the best decision for your organization.

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