New development enables greater focus on user adoption, improved process, and driving development
Background
Baptist Health’s commitment to rapidly growing their network of hospitals and enterprise-wide platform transformation was hindered by an outdated Learning Management System (LMS) inadequately expanding and maturing with their needs. The absence of platform innovation enabled inconsistent processes and approaches across hospitals in the organization. These silos created challenge in communication, governance and learning and development for the entire organization. They needed to find a sophisticated LMS platform to support their learners and administrators in order to compete in the Healthcare space.
Client
For nearly a century, Baptist Health has brought advanced medical technology, modern facilities, and many of the region’s most prominent physicians and medical professionals to the communities of their commonwealth. Headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky, Baptist Health’s company portfolio includes 300 points of care including homecare and outpatient facilities which offer Urgent Care, Express Care, occupational medicine, physical therapy and diagnostics. Their hospitals, care centers, physician offices, health facilities, and physician network of more than 3,000 employed and affiliated physicians continues to grow as they endeavor to improve access to healthcare and enhance the health of Kentucky as a whole.
Challenge
To match Baptist Health’s ambitious growth and complex platform needs, the organization had to look beyond traditional healthcare LMS platforms such as HealthStream to accomplish three main goals:
- Deploy an easy, intuitive LMS that employees would consistently use
- Improve training and compliance administration efficiency
- Move to a best-of-breed platform that supported learning and talent management processes beyond those in place today
Anticipating the requirements for varied communities they were onboarding through acquisitions required Baptist Health to think strategically and in advance about detailed requirements and the associated priorities. They also hoped to align and integrate the new LMS with the upcoming new Workday HRIS implementation to establish a clean, comprehensive, and refreshed employee experience given Workday’s learning features alone were not sufficient for their needs. In addition to solution-driven challenges, once Baptist Health committed to aligning the implementation with the HRIS schedule they had a strict timeline of four months to move off their antiquated and customized LMS.
Solution
Baptist Health chose Saba Cloud as their LMS platform and Educe Group as their services partner because together they demonstrated a commitment to support the evolving Baptist Health LMS vision, backed by a track record of tactical and strategic partnership. With an aggressive implementation timeline, the expertise that Educe Group offered through its array of experience in the healthcare industry gave Baptist Health the confidence that their intended focus on the long-term path and potential of their organizations and employees would not be lost during the quick pace of the initial deployment project. In order to meet their timeline for both implementations, they needed to partner closely to complete the following tasks over the course of 4 months:
Step 1: Develop roadmap for future planning
Before the project even began, Educe Group and Baptist Health jointly built a roadmap that encompassed everything they wanted to achieve over the next two years and beyond. Baptist Health operated with the destination in mind and invested in using the Saba platform to its best ability. Educe Group focused on providing a realistic, strategic plan that prioritized the implementation of high impact features while still managing key timelines for the onboarding of acquired hospitals.
Step 2: Break down silos and standardize LMS
The project team worked closely with IT and Facility Administrators to share knowledge, gather input, and deliberately invest in supporting facility-based teams from a Change Management standpoint. The team was a part of key weekly conversations focused on dismantling the organization’s silos, and Educe helped them facilitate this change by:
- Leveraging the implementation process to reinforce a new way of working
- Providing a regular, iterative review of designed solutions
- Organizing breakout sessions on topics to seed knowledge consistently
- Producing critical local administrator change management tools such as dedicated training and job aids
- Engaging administrator stakeholders throughout the entire project in person
The move towards standardization also allowed for new LMS administrators to come on board during the implementation with less effort and risk to the project and program.
Step 3: Maintain communication with external stakeholders
Baptist Health took the platform change as an opportunity to internally address governance challenges by establishing governance councils. Educe worked with them to provide recommendations and establish relationships with key executives. They also connected with project stakeholders to ensure communication and escalation paths were clear in order to keep tasks and decisions on track within the same timeline. The Educe and Baptist LMS teams actively joined Workday meetings, so they could provide the LMS context in real-time and monitor the progress of specific tasks and associated impacts on the LMS. This ultimately enabled the team to test the Saba Workday connector properly in a coordinated, on time fashion — again, without major issues or risk to a critical go-live timeline.
Step 4: Launch employer branding campaign
In order to promote the new LMS and excite employees, the team worked with internal marketing and deployed a rebranding strategy entitled “DevelopYou Campaign.” New logos and resources were created to reinforce the DevelopYou campaign and Educe helped them execute both the soft launch and the public launch, which was ultimately rolled out to users.
Educe Group’s leadership, functional and technical expertise were phenomenal assets for us. They played a pivotal role in deploying a sustainable Talent Management platform for Baptist Health’s diverse needs.”
Tony Fullen, Corporate IT Manager
Baptist Health
Results
Baptist Health successfully unified their learning processes for 17,000 users with the implementation of Saba Cloud. Not only did they surpass their deadline goal, but they were able to get both systems integrated without major issues, further allowing Baptist Health to:
- Provide robust, cloud-based, real-time and time-saving reporting
- Engage learners with a fresh user experience
- Move away from antiquated process and give administrators more time to devote to the LMS
- Enable sharing and use of best practices across every facility
- Achieve process efficiencies and platform consolidation
- Establish a plan for onboarding future hospital acquisitions
- Move forward with a genuine vision for talent management grounded in learning and development
What’s Next
As Baptist Health continues to grow, they will leverage Educe Group to help them with post go-live support, including:
- Launching a new modern and responsive UI
- Proactively managing the Saba Cloud release cycle to take maximum advantage of ongoing enhancements
- Advising on the evolution of their strategic roadmap
- Tightening the link between learning and performance
- Healthy onboarding of other Baptist Health facilities
- Developing custom training content
- Expanding to mobile learning
- Assisting in the planning and execution of key ongoing learning and initiatives
Baptist Health is thrilled with the successful launch of their LMS, and they plan on leveraging Educe’s release services to drive user adoption and improve existing processes.
Our partnership with Educe Group is wonderful! Every now and then you partner with a team where the relationship fosters a unique level of trust, creativity, understanding, and results from each other. Our entire team is excited to continue to work with them on the next phases of our Talent Management journey.”
Tony Fullen, Corporate IT Manager
Baptist Health
