Emirates Health Services saves over $5 million with Totara Learn

Emirates Health Services (EHS) is the leading healthcare provider in the Northern and Eastern Emirates of the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Its facilities include 17 hospitals, 70 primary healthcare centers, and a number of dental and specialized health centers. It is owned and operated by the UAE Federal Government.

The Challenge

EHS is a large organization of over 11,500 employees with a deep integration with a number of outsourced functions, such as labs, radiology and kidney dialysis. Among those employees are more than 200 PhD and 400 Masters or equivalent holders. Therefore, as an organization, EHS has a wealth of knowledge and experiences, spread across a wide geographical area.

On the other hand, the spread across more than 100 dispersed facilities significantly hinders the consistency of training offerings and the ability of staff to sufficiently participate without negatively impacting the service.

Finally, as a Government entity, the training function is conscious of the need to control costs and maximize benefits from available resources, and is constantly exploring innovative approaches to achieve its goals with minimum waste.

The Solution

Watch the full customer testimonial video here

After several internal discussions, benchmarking visits and examination of the relevant business literature, EHS elected to adopt a knowledge management approach to its learning and development strategy. Working with local partner Human Logic, it customized Totara to launch its own learning and knowledge management platform, Maharati (Arabic for My Skills) – a portal to address all staff (and partner) knowledge and learning needs.

Maharati facilitated all the following, and more:

• Converting some of the extensive body of tacit knowledge in the organization into interactive e-learning courses, available to share with all EHS staff, any time and anywhere
• Collaboration with local, regional, and international partners to create learning content, freely available to staff and partners
• Support for the EHS simulation training program, through flipped classroom and blended learning approaches, enabling EHS to maximize the benefit of the simulation lab and face-to-face time
• Harmonization of the learning and onboarding of both EHS and partner staff, ensuring they all speak the same language and operate to the same standards
• Access to the extensive eLibrary institutional subscriptions, through integrating the subscriptions authenticator into the system
• Easy access to knowledge and learning from any device, using the adaptive website on any device, as well as through apps on Android and iOS
• A growing number of active knowledge repositories, that curate topics of interest for particular functions (e.g. hospitals, nursing, human resources), interest groups (e.g. COVID-19, antibiotic stewardship, mental health), or strategic topics (e.g. innovation, future skills, benchmarking reports)
• A central location for marketing, implementing and preserving strategic campaigns (e.g. UAE Innovation Month, UAE Reading Month, International Simulation Week)
• Enhanced Totara experience through custom plugins such as job shadowing, course requests/approval automation and multitenancy integration were delivered by Totara Partner Human Logic

To a great extent, Maharati has become a true embodiment of the Dubai Expo 2020 slogan: “Connecting minds, creating the future.”

The Results

To date, Maharati has managed 1.6 million contact training hours. Of those, more than 700,000 came as the result of the Maharati-enabled knowledge management strategy, resulting in financial savings exceeding $5 million. Another notable result is how Maharati allowed EHS to maintain training even during the COVID-19 pandemic, with only a minimal drop in 2020, and a strong recovery after.

Additionally, Maharati was a core enabler towards EHS ISO 30401:2018 in Knowledge Management (the first federal government Entity and first healthcare entity in the UAE to achieve it) as well as GC-Mark in knowledge management (the first government entity worldwide to achieve Platinum Level recognition).

The positive feedback the Maharati team regularly receives from both managers and users is a true sign of success when staff contact the Maharati team at the Training & Development Center (TDC) in EHS, asking how they can contribute to Maharati and/or how they can leverage Maharati to solve pressing business, knowledge or learning needs in their work areas.

“Maharati is amazing! It is so much easier now to ensure that everyone is on the same page.”– Departmental Manager, Emirates Health Services

Furthermore, EHS started leveraging Maharati to support other government healthcare initiatives, including the National Baby Friendly Initiative, National Healthcare Support Volunteer Program, National Anti-Childhood Obesity Campaign and more.