Austin Health’s highly successful LMS delivers learning to 9,000 employees

Austin Health is a major academic public health service providing healthcare, health professional education and health research. Austin Health has a strong and growing tradition in clinical teaching and training, and is affiliated with 16 universities and 4 TAFEs. Located in north east Melbourne, we provide a comprehensive range of acute, subacute, outpatient, mental health and outreach services to our local community.

The Challenge

Austin Health was one of the only tertiary healthcare organisations within Victoria without a learning management system. This meant there were very limited IT systems in place to manage, track and deliver online training for staff; limiting options for education delivery and impacting efficiency and accuracy of administration and reporting.

To continue to lead innovative practice, Austin Health needed to embrace alternative methods of education delivery and training. An integrated LMS would enable Austin Health to establish a collaborative learning platform, providing a single portal to bring training together across all areas of the organisation.

The Solution

Austin Health embarked on a selection process via a formal tender which detailed Austin Health’s requirements. Shortlisted vendors were interviewed, invited to present to Austin Health and clarify any remaining questions around the proposed solution and integration with existing systems. The successful vendor, platinum Totara partner Androgogic, was engaged to implement Totara Learn along with the collaborative learning system Totara Social, to create the ATLAS learning platform.

Mandatory online compliance courses were redesigned and developed for the new LMS, using the new branding. They were available as part of the launch of the platform.

The remainder of Austin Health’s courses were predominantly face to face, delivered by units and departments across the institutions. The strategy for these courses has been to support course owners with a course governance framework and supporting resources to facilitate the conversion of courses to a blended learning format. The development of learning objectives and their alignment to competencies, together with pre and post-assessment questions, templated course feedback have ensured consistent presentation of course content across the organisation and rich data to demonstrate transfer of knowledge and both subjective and objective course analysis.

While the initial focus of the system was on organisation-wide priorities, local managers are already seeing benefits for their areas and are enthusiastically engaging with the Clinical Education Unit to develop tailored online and blended programs for their areas.

The LMS was also designed to:

• administer, document, track, report training programs, classroom and online events, e-learning programs, and training content collaboratively across Austin Health
• identify training requirements for roles and prospective training and utilise competency-based learning to discover learning gaps and guide training material selection
• support content such as pre and post-assessments, text and image content, videos and interactive e-learning (SCORM compliant) packages

The strong relationship between Austin Health and Androgogic has assisted with identifying innovative solutions, timely delivery of features and enhancements, and confidence in the ongoing performance and maintenance of the system.

This Totara Learn project was praised by the CEO and the executive for its success in implementation and the impact that it is already making on the learning and development of Austin Health’s staff.

“The intuitive nature of the system for users and the efficiencies now gained in processes for managers have been significant improvements. Our educators are now able to explore much more innovative and flexible ways of delivering education, and the rigour in the way in which we consistently monitor the quality of our teaching as also greatly improved.”

The Results

The implementation of ATLAS has been a great success with the system being integral to further enhance Austin Health’s reputation as leaders in education and training.

Now five months into implementation, the system is meeting all functional expectations and management feedback is very positive with the deployment being deemed a great success. The system has been rolled out to 9,000 employees, with an average of less than one LMS support request a day – very low for a platform of this size.

There are now approximately 220 courses available via ATLAS, with 24/7 internal and external access to learning content. This includes the fact that mandatory training is now available to interns online prior to orientation, with a 95% completion rate, saving two hours of orientation time which can now be spent on tasks better suited to face-to-face time.

While initial focus of the system was on organisation-wide priorities, local managers are already seeing benefits for their areas and are enthusiastically engaging with the Clinical Education Unit to develop tailored online and blended programs for their areas.

The strong relationship between Austin Health and Androgogic has assisted with identifying innovative solutions, timely delivery of features and enhancements, and confidence in the ongoing performance and maintenance of the system.

This Totara Learn project was praised by the CEO and the executive for its success in implementation and impact that it is already making to the learning and development of Austin Health’s staff.

“We see the relationship we have with Totora and Androgogic as a partnership in which we are able to problem solve together ways in which we can improve the system to meet the needs of the healthcare sector moving forward. This was one of the main differentiators that we valued when making our choice for the system and vendor to best suit our needs now and into the future.”