Cleveland Clinic reduced its annual spend on learning technology by 70% with Totara

Cleveland Clinic Foundation (CCF), located in Cleveland, Ohio, is a not-for-profit, multispecialty academic medical center that integrates clinical and hospital care with research and education.

Founded in 1921 by four renowned physicians with a vision of providing outstanding patient care based upon the principles of cooperation, compassion and innovation, Cleveland Clinic has become one of the largest and most-respected hospitals in the US.

The Challenge

When CCF started their journey with Totara in 2015, they faced a number of challenges:

• CCF needed to consolidate 14 learning systems across corporate and academic functions into a single platform and have a platform flexible enough to support future migrations from acquired or merged organizations
• CCF needed to meet the unique needs of each of the constituent organization across a complex and varied user landscape which ranged from the medical school and internal health science schools to corporate compliance and caregiver development
• CCF has a passion for creating rich, immersive and community-based learning experiences and needed a technology that would expand their portfolio of solutions, not limit it
• CCF needed a partner who could help them get the most out of their LMS and make it the center of their complex learning ecosystem

The Solution

CCF has been on a six-year journey of implementing Totara to meet an ever-expanding set of the use cases. Some highlights of this solution include:

Freedom to save

Over this time, users from 14 different learning management systems and other LMS-like platforms have been migrated to Totara. The Totara, known as My Learning at CCF, has become the central hub of learning across this complex organization.

Freedom to innovate

• Totara is just one of many learning technologies deployed at CCF. To get the most out of these systems, CCF needed to enable seamless user journeys across them. Leveraging Totara’s robust APIs and open system architecture, CCF has integrated Totara with 17 other systems
• With over 70,000 employees and tens of thousands of affiliates, partners, vendors and students, CCF needed a system that could handle this complex data set. Totara’s flexible HR sync and data structures support the import of data feeds from nine unique HR and onboarding systems, producing over 100,000 records, updating or adding over 50,000 of those records per day
• Totara’s open architecture has empowered the CCF team to design and develop solutions to meet their unique needs around continuing education and medical schools capstone requirement which required creating a complex, unique application for scheduling multiple learners to multiple small group sessions occurring concurrently. The sessions have varying capacity and frequency based on the topic and instructor availability, and the application has a real-time dashboard for both learners and instructors
• To support their complex environment, CCF has taken full advantage of Totara’s ability to create personalized learning experience by including more than 50 metadata elements in the user profile to create tailored catalogs, assign learning and create focused user experiences with dashboards

Freedom to learn

• Totara’s expansive set of learning activities empower learners, teachers and trainers to design and deploy learning solutions for a diverse audience including medical students, doctors, nurses, corporate employees and more

The Results

Cleveland Clinic is the only academic medical center in the United States that has a unified LMS for their corporate, academic and commercial education requirements.

They have increased the LMS-based delivery and capture of continuing education (CE) credit from several hundred eligible completions in 2016 to over 250,000 in 2021. These completions took place across a total of 102,617 unique users taking 3,816 courses for a total of 1,405,834 completions YTD in 2021 (through 11/8/2021).

Cleveland Clinic processes over 100,000 user records on a daily basis (updates and new account creations). These records each contain up to 62 unique demographic fields from nine different source systems.

They have created dashboards with both Zoola and Tableau and deployed over 100 custom dashboards to the enterprise.

As a result of these initiatives, Cleveland Clinic has reduced its annual spend on learning technology by approximately 70%, from a combined total over $1.1 million to roughly $350k. This reduction includes merger and acquisition hospitals that no longer needed their own LMS.

“I don’t want to use any variation of the word “simple,” because delivering such a large volume of content to an audience of our size is still a very difficult task, but Totara has provided us the opportunity to streamline this process to a degree that we did not think was possible when we started this journey in 2015. Through the flexibility of the platform, as well as the support of our partner, Kineo, we have been able to accomplish some pretty impressive things over the past five years, with many more things to come.”
– Jonathan Bonezzi, Director of Educational Technology and Resources, Cleveland Clinic Foundation