Health Authorities adopt new learning management system (LMS) to begin standardizing the delivery of education services to employees and healthcare stakeholders

Background

Based on work undertaken between the Department of Health and Community Services (HCS) and the Centre for Learning and Development (CLD), a memorandum of understanding (MOU) has been issued to pursue the consolidation of eLearning initiatives of the four (4) Regional Health Authorities (RHAs) onto a shared Learning Management System (LMS) platform.

The following Regional Health Authorities will be affected:

• Eastern Health
• Central Health
• Western Health
• Labrador-Grenfell

Medworxx was the eLearning platform for the health authorities.  With the impending expiry of the current agreement on May 31, 2019, the Department of Health and Community Services must decide to renew the existing agreement or replace the current system.  After concluding that Medworxx was failing to deliver on support agreements and functional requirements, alternative platforms were explored.

Investigation and analysis have taken place to determine the best course of action based on several organizational requirements, and it has been concluded that the desirable course of action to replace the current Medworxx system with an internally owned and managed Learning Management System (LMS), modelled on the platform employed by the Centre for Learning and Development (CLD). To be able to prepare for and complete the delivery of the new learning management system, a deadline of March 31, 2019 has been imposed to achieve consensus.  This will allow for environment preparation, content preparation, and if no agreement is reached, enough time to make alternate arrangements.

Project Highlights

The LMS will be responsible for facilitating the learning needs of approximately 20,700 users, itemized as follows:

Bi-Directional integration will be established with the RHA’s Integrated Employee Record (IER) currently used by the RHA’s provincial Incident reporting system called PIERS.  

The IER is governed by a standard Minimum Data Set defining the data elements that can be shared in the IER. HR data is synchronized from the four HRIS databases multiple times per day and using this data will simplify the integration process, data management functions and also guarantee a unique identifier per person providing a more comprehensive record of competencies for any employee having worked for one or more of the RHA’s.

Competency/Training data from LEARN will be integrated into the IER and its associated Data Warehouse to support other data consumption and integration requirements. This information will also be accessible to HR and users using the Titan desktop application which is currently used to manage data linked to the integrated employee record. Titan facilitates a secure RHA view of their information supporting privacy and security requirements of autonomous organizations.