Business: Medical Imaging Software
Location: Mississauga,Canada
The Company
Cedara Software develops workflow software products for OEMs and distributors serving the medical industry. The products range from registration and reporting to imaging and archiving. For example, the company's imaging software enables radiologists to read x-rays, CT and MRI scans, ultrasound, and other imaging modalities from a computer instead of film. The radiologist can create 3-D images, zoom in, adjust contrast and, overall, gain a much better idea of a patient's condition. Cedara also builds about 30 percent of the MRI scanners in use worldwide. Cedara works with companies such as Toshiba, eMed, and Cerner.
Cedara employs ReadyGo Web Course Builder (WCB) to create online training courses for its customers.
The Challenge
Cedara's OEM and distributor customers must be trained regarding the Cedara software installation and use. Of course, the OEM and distributors' customers must also be trained.
"I used PowerPoint for training in the past," says David Wilson, product manager for Cedara I-Softview TM, Cedara's imaging software. "A 100-page course that I recently completed with ReadyGo Web Course Builder in about two weeks would have run close to 350 pages in PowerPoint, and would have taken up to three months to create."
Because Cedara is global, with many customers in Asia and Europe, classroom training, while provided, was prohibitively expensive. Wilson often had to compress the PowerPoint courses and send them over the Internet. He says it took "forever". Cedara decided to move to e-learning, or web-based training.
According to Wilson, Cedara considered 20 or more authoring tools for course development. Live training software was prohibitively expensive, as were many of the more standard authoring tools. The company also considered products similar to ReadyGo Web Course Builder (WCB), but found them more expensive than ReadyGo WCB and not as easy to use.
"I saw ReadyGo WCB at a trade show, and realized that it was the perfect authoring tool for us," says Wilson.
The ReadyGo WCB Solution
"For me, the most important features were ReadyGo Web Course Builder's built-in pedagogy and HTML conversion capability," says Wilson. "I'm neither a teacher nor a programmer and, with WCB, I don't have to be. WCB guides you through course design and automatically converts plain English into HTML for web use."
Other features employed by Wilson include "Tips", which he uses to delineate a specific modality of operation; "Did You Know", to provide clinically relevant facts; and "Step-by-Step" to show actual operation.
"Customer feedback has been great, especially for update features," says Wilson. "And, there's an extra plus. We never thought of ReadyGo Web Course Builder as a sales tool, but our OEM and distributor customers are using the ReadyGo WCB-built courses as a selling and training tool for their customers, the medical end users."
Inspired by Cedara's customer successes, Wilson is now developing a sales and marketing course in ReadyGo WCB, which will be burned on to a CD and distributed to customers in Asia and Europe.
