Business: Health Care
Location: Florida
The Company
Miami Children's Hospital (MCH) is a world leader in pediatric healthcare,
treating more than 175,000 patients yearly. With a medical staff of more than 650 physicians,
the hospital is renowned for excellence in all aspects of pediatric medical care from birth through adolescence.
Centers of excellence in cardiology, hematology/oncology, neuroscience, pulmonology, preventive medicine and intensive
care have helped the hospital become a world leader in medical education.
MCH is a member of the Child Health Corporation of American (CHCA), a 38-member business alliance of Children's Hospitals across the United States. CHCA boasts its own virtual university known as CHEX -- Children's Hospital Knowledge Exchange. CHEX both offers courses and enables its member hospitals to create courses tailored to their needs.
The Challenge
Training and teaching are ongoing, integral parts of MCH's operations. Medical
personnel must upgrade skills and keep abreast of a large number of constantly
changing rules and regulations. Training was typically conducted in a classroom
environment and required employees to either come in on their days off or
arrange to leave work to take a class.
Preparing and updating courses was also time-consuming. According to Loubna Noureddin, staff performance specialist at MCH, it could take 8-12 hours simply to update a course.
"We felt that by offering a series of short 'courselets' online, we could lessen considerably the impact of training on both employees and the hospital routines," says Noureddin. "What I needed was a good web authoring tool that would enable us to create the courselets quickly and easily."
The ReadyGo WCB Solution
CHEX recommended the ReadyGo Web Course Builder (WCB) to its hospital clients,
and Noureddin decided to give it a try. The first course was MCH's "Environment of
Care" course, which is required of every member of the hospital's
staff so as to prepare them for emergencies such as power outages, fire, hazardous
spills, infection, and just about every other emergency imaginable.
"I've worked with several other authoring tools, and they proved difficult to learn and work with," Noureddin says. "It took about two hours to learn ReadyGo WCB, and about six hours to create a course. Plus, future updates will be really quick and easy."
Noureddin broke the Environment of Care course into three parts of approximately 20 minutes each. Medical staff have the choice of taking the course in increments, or all at once. Most importantly, they can take the course from home, or in spare time at work.
According to Noureddin, ReadyGo offers several features that help speed course development time. Format options regarding color, fonts and background are selected with a click of the mouse. Noureddin did not have to worry about HTML -- she simply typed the courses in English, and ReadyGo WCB automatically converted to web-ready format.
"The tech support at ReadyGo is great," says Noureddin. "They are extremely responsive, and I never had to wait for an answer."
"Feedback from students is also good," says Noureddin. "Employees who are computer-savvy like the course and find it easy to take. Courses are offered to those with less computing experience, but they tend to find the course easier than expected, too."
"We can thank CHEX for recommending a really good web authoring tool in the ReadyGo WCB," Noureddin says.
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