eLearning has obvious advantages for large organisations that need to continually update their workforce’s skills. It’s a scalable and relatively inexpensive form of training. It allows for asynchronous learning. Advances in mobile learning has made it more accessible than ever before. These benefits of eLearning in healthcare are all relevant to hospitals and healthcare institutions, which must work around tight budgets and long staff hours to provide critical professional development courses.
The importance of clinical education in healthcare
Education is central to the healthcare industry. Healthcare professionals must spend their career honing their skills in decision-making, analysis, evaluation and communication. eLearning in healthcare must take the specific needs of the industry into account.
The allied health professions have always been quick to adapt to the latest research and innovation. Professional development has long been a key part of the job. However, the structure of the healthcare industry worldwide is undergoing a profound change. Hospitals are reacting to rapid changes in technology, which offer not just medical innovation, but also increased efficiency. Healthcare institutions are finding new ways to collaborate with insurance and pharmaceutical companies to develop accessible and affordable plans for care. The industry is moving towards value-based care to get more from services.
Patients are becoming more aware and more involved in their own health management. This is increasing the demand for mobile and online information. PwC’s survey of top health industry trends underlines these coming changes. It’s striking how critical the role of online training will become. From augmented reality games about nutrition or educating young doctors about structural change in the health system, to integrating technology introduced by new partnerships, providing strong educational resources to manage infectious diseases, or collecting data from patients, it’s clear that eLearning in healthcare has huge potential.
The effectiveness of eLearning in clinical education
There’s no doubt that eLearning is effective in clinical education. A recent study has confirmed that students in the health professions acquire knowledge and skills through eLearning “as well as or better than they do through traditional teaching.” However, the study also highlights certain barriers to eLearning.
Plan for effective delivery
The first step in preparing your course is to think about how you will deliver it, and whether your learners are really going to learn in the way that you expect. The WHO report on eLearning for Undergraduate Health Professional Education identifies several Critical Success Factors which determine the effectiveness of eLearning in healthcare, including:
- its organisational setting;
- the technological infrastructure;
- the instructional systems and curriculum design.
Will your learners have sufficient IT skills and support to succeed? eLearning can reduce the pressure for teaching staff, but it could increase the workload for eLearning curriculum developers. There’s also the potential that over-stretched hospital staff will end up doing their coursework outside of work hours. There’s a risk eLearning could become an addition to the burden. The report also points out that “each stakeholder brings forward a variety of motivations pertaining to the benefits and risks of an intervention – such as economic, technological, or pedagogical legitimacy” (56), and that this influence can determine whether the course is well-received. You’ll need to plan carefully around each of these factors for a successful course.
Design for healthcare as a system
You may be designing a very specific course in a specialised area. However, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that the healthcare industry is a highly interdependent system. In this excellent interview on eLearning and health financing, Senior Health Financing Specialist Matthew Jowett points out that it’s easy to forget this kind of broad perspective:
“…we go to great lengths to position our thinking on health financing within the broader health system. We frame it very carefully. If you look at the first module of the e-learning course, it’s not really about health financing—it’s about universal health coverage. It comes to health financing and considers: How does health financing contribute, together with other elements of the health system, to making progress toward UHC? That’s the real question.”
For Jowett, the best way to make these connections is to design courses that are flexible and adaptable. Jowett sees his course developing in four different ways:
- as a standard distance learning course;
- as an introductory module to be completed before face-to-face training;
- as a refresher module after a training course;
- or as one element in “a structured blended learning and capacity building program.”
If an eLearning course is to be used in all these different ways, then it must be relevant to each of these different contexts. The key for Jowett is to be “creative” in thinking about how technical assistance is delivered; in the health industry, eLearning needs to be more valuable than a simple, static course.
Get the most from interactive media
Interactive media has huge educational potential for eLearning in healthcare. So many diagnoses now depend on scans. Online learning can present these images and diagrams in ways that a static textbook can’t. A textbook quiz is quickly mastered, but online learning environments can vary the content and test examples to keep giving a new challenge. An interactive eLearning course can prompt students to use higher-order thinking skills in analysing, distinguishing, categorising, comparing and interpreting information. Passive reading could never offer these inbuilt challenges. Video-based simulations are also perfect for medical education: scenarios are immersive and affective, and the learner’s emotions are immediately engaged as their real-world experience is tested.
As augmented and virtual reality technologies develop, they will quickly come to have a huge influence in healthcare education. Their great strength is that they allow doctors and nurses to make mistakes in a realistic, low-risk environment. It’s worth keeping up-to-date with these developments—this article from The Medical Futurist gives some great examples of the potentials of AR and VR for both doctors and patients.
Get patients involved
eLearning will also have an important role in public awareness campaigns and online health initiatives. Medical research has always recognised the importance of studying community health. With the introduction of digital health initiatives, this community is set to expand. The EU has already funded some online public health programmes, such as IROHLA, a project that advances health literacy in older people in Europe. A good overview is provided in this article from efrontlearning.com.
eLearning courses could also be of great use in pharmacy. Patients often need training in how to take medicine or manage their symptoms. These online courses could be vital for pharmaceutical researchers who need to collect information directly from patients about their health.
Similarly, wearable tech will provide huge opportunities to access massive samples of data. An interview with Roman Chernyshev, senior vice president of healthcare and life sciences at global technology consulting firm DataArt, explains that “it is a matter of time before medical devices collect continuously vital data from millions of patients around the world in real time and simultaneously compare them………Medical conditions will be predicted as a result of data and constant monitoring of health information.”
Personal monitoring devices can change the lives of patients who need to manage chronic conditions. However, they can cause healthy people to worry about irrelevant fluctuations in their body. Doctors need to stay ahead of this demand for wearable technology to influence how it’s designed and used.
It’s clear that eHealth in all its forms is growing. A recent EU survey has shown that Europeans are comfortable using online health information. Six out of ten reported going online for health information. The goal for healthcare practitioners is to ensure that patients have access to reliable information online, as one part of a comprehensive healthcare strategy.
