Developing a robust training program with Don Spiers, Senior Product Manager, Relias

In this episode of the Post-Acute POV, our host Kim Broyer, VP of professional services at MatrixCare, is joined by Don Spiers, Senior Product Manager at Relias, to discuss important tips for developing a robust training program in post-acute care.

Listen in to Don and Kim’s conversation as they touch on creating a budget for training, choosing key performance indicators, and working with an interdisciplinary team to boost existing training programs. Don also shares a personal example of the importance of keeping employees engaged and providing a path for growth when working to improve retention. Find their full conversation below.

Topics discussed during today’s episode:

1. [01:06 – 03:07]: First, Don provides his origin story and what brought him to his current role as Senior Product Manager at Relias.
2. [03:24 – 07:26]: Don then provides the three pillars for why he believes a strong training program is important for post-acute care providers: compliance, quality, and turnover.
3. [7:59 – 12:04]: Thirdly, Don describes the importance of being agile when it comes to developing a robust training program. Understanding that business needs will change as well as the needs of your employees is critical.
4. [12:33 – 18:11]: Don provides recommendations for tools and resources providers should use including in-person training, virtual live courses, and blended learning with on-demand courses employees can view on their own schedules.
5. [18:52 – 22:35]: Next, Don shares how providers should focus on creating a budget, choosing key performance indicators, and working with an interdisciplinary team to boost their existing training program.
6. [23:10 – 26:02]: Don then shares a personal example of the importance of keeping employees engaged and providing a path for growth when working to improve retention.
7. [26:59 – 30:52]: Lastly, Don touches on what an EHR can contribute to developing a robust training program and the importance of standardization to yield consistent results.

Resources

• Find out more about Relias: https://www.relias.com/
• Listen to more episodes of the Post-Acute POV

Disclaimer

The content in this presentation or materials is for informational purposes only and is provided “as-is.” Information and views expressed herein, may change without notice. We encourage you to seek as appropriate, regulatory and legal advice on any of the matters covered in this presentation or materials.

©2021 by MatrixCare

Transcript

Speaker 1

Hi, and welcome to the Post-Acute Point of View, our discussion hub for healthcare technology in the out of hospital space. Here we talk about the latest news and views on trends and innovation that can impact the way post-acute care providers work. And we take a look at how technology can make a difference in today’s changing healthcare landscape in both home-based and facility-based care organizations and the lives of the people they serve. Today we hear from Kim Broyer, Vice President of Professional Services for MatrixCare and her special guest. Let’s dive in.

Kim Broyer

Hi, this is Kim Broyer, Vice President of Professional Services at MatrixCare, and I want to thank you all for joining us today for another episode of the Post-Acute Point of View. Today we have a special guest, Don Spears, Senior Product Manager at Relias here to discuss developing a robust training program. Let’s get started. Don, let’s begin by having you tell our audience your origin story, a little bit about your early career and what led you to your current position.

Don Spears

Yeah. Hi, Kim. Thanks for having me. Super excited to participate. I wish I had a really cool superhero style origin story where I go spend years as a monk or something and come back with this renewed vision, but pretty bog standard stuff. So I graduated from university. I’d spent some time while in university and shortly thereafter working in home and community based services as an aid. But I was looking and reflecting on my life at that point and one of the things that I always wanted to do was maybe go into healthcare. But after spending some time in it doing some different adventures within the healthcare realm, I decided I wanted to support healthcare. I’m fairly technology minded at being a younger generation and I wanted to see what impacts I could have there. I quickly started looking at technology companies around me.

Don Spears

I actually found Relias pretty early. And one of the things that appealed to me was this aspect of training. And it wasn’t just your bog standard compliance training, it was your development of staff and leading to enhanced career growth and providing the best in class education that you could to ensure that staff are competent and feel confident in the position. And when I was doing my interview, the thing that stuck out to me was that it kind of hit me in my core from my own onboarding into a healthcare organization, which was very quick, very light, very high level, kind of get you on the floor as fast as possible, and then support was available, but it wasn’t necessarily of the standardized organizational thing. And so that quickly became my mission. So I guess if I did have a hero story, it would be in an interview for a small business sales position at Relias.

Don Spear

I was struck with the mission and suddenly wanted to make a big difference in how we’re educating and onboarding staff and how we’re preparing them for their careers, but then also taking care of some of those things that we need to take care of as an organization like compliance and quality risk management, things like that. And so, as you can tell, I started at Relias maybe six years ago. And so now I’m a Senior Product Manager. I’ll be directly over some of our compliance and regulatory. I’ve been mostly working in our post-acute care line, across regulatory career development, staff improvement, and really leading the charge in trying to change how we educate that frontline staff and how organizations can support them.

Kim Broyer

That’s great. Thank you so much for sharing that. It sounds like your healthcare background and your own training and onboarding experiences really play into what you’re able to provide for customers. So with that, why is a strong training program important to the post-acute care providers?

Don Spears

For one, it’s compliance, right? Everyone’s got to check that box and then there’s two, there’s the quality sort of performance standards and then three, there’s turnover. You can kind of boil it down to those three. With compliance, you have to check that box. If you think of a Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if you don’t have a strong program, that’s standardized, you are not going to necessarily be checking that box effectively. I think a lot of people look to just get things like HIPAA taken care of, but don’t think about the impact that insufficient training or non-standardized training can have on effective training. Right? If you have people reading something the same way, that’s great, they’re reading it the same way, they’re interpreting it the same way, and then they’re going out and their behavior is going to be the same. So if you want people to have the same behaviors, you have to do the standardization and people don’t think about that with compliance, right?

Don Spears

It’s a really quick check the box, get this out of the way, but problems can brew in non-standardization because bad habits can transfer compliance, got to get that box checked. You have to make sure it’s strong because you want to make sure that one of your top areas of risk, whether you’re mostly scared of a surveyor or a fine, or maybe just improper care or abuse or something, you got to make sure that’s taken care of. And again, effective. The second thing’s quality colleague of mine and friend named, Sandy McManus has always said, “You have a culture it’s whether or not you’re driving it, that matters.” And that’s extremely important for things like quality. When you talk about organizations who have a culture of learning, they’re driving that. It’s the same thing with quality. It’s really where you set your standards and where you set those important critical milestones for your own staff’s development, and really buy in on managing their competencies, managing those soft skills, managing their leadership and growth, all of those drive quality.

Don Spears

And then lastly, on the back end of that is turnover. I’m sure we could point to any number of reports that correlate turnover and quality together. But I think right now with what we’re going through as a country, in terms of the staffing crisis and healthcare, and just how accelerated it’s gotten, it’s important to not forget that investment in staff is still crucial to keeping them engaged. And as soon as they’re not engaged, they’re going to be maybe a foot in and a foot out of the organization. And so supporting staff is just as important as creating an environment of inclusion and just as important as developing those leadership skills and things like that.

Don Spears

So recently Relias did its 2021 state of healthcare training and staff development report, and it yielded quite a few findings. One of those was that 62% of the respondents whose organizations have a diversity, equity, inclusion or DEI initiative, 90% of them support them with training. And so it’s very important if you’re planning on picking that up to provide training. But if you do do that, note that with only 40% of those had a manager required to participate in that training. And so when we talk about developing leadership and we talk about developing a supportive program to help prevent things like turnover, it starts from the top down.

Don Spears

And so when we look at something like diversity, equity, inclusion and its role in maybe impacting turnover, not just the support of staff member being supported in their clinical adventures, but also feeling like the organization is really driving its culture, making the adjustments needed to ensure staff are included. It starts from the top down. And so one thing we notice is that by not including a requirement for the managerial or supervisory staff to require to take them that DEI training, we’re not necessarily setting the precedent that this is important.

Don Spears

And so we’re finding that in our other surveys, which show a big part of disengagement is the willingness for organizations and corporations to take these initiatives seriously. So we were really happy to see that it was 62% of organizations that had those initiatives, but we were really disappointed with the percentage that required upper management to take that training. But that’s the type of things you have to be looking for is where are we requiring training? How are we delivering that training? And then how is that training ultimately impacting things like staff turnover? And so by looking at, in a recent area like that, you can see that if you’re not focused on delivering that training and requiring the right people to participate, you may not be driving that environment of inclusion in the way that you anticipate.

Kim Broyer

Great information that you shared there and completely agree. Like that you covered number three, as a turnover. As we talk every day with providers, we’re hearing more and more about that challenge. And I think what you mentioned, the focus on culture and that training approach, and really ensuring that you’re keeping people really focused on how do you prevent the turnover through training. So you highlighted those three areas, compliance, quality, and turnover. So with that, could you share a little bit more about what you think are the key factors in a strong training program when considering those three areas?

Don Spears

Of course, and I didn’t necessarily highlight the important aspect that maybe clinical education and performance standards have as an impact on turnover and try to make sure I kind of align on that here, but I think that’s also going to pop up on this question. One of the most important ones I can think of is the ability to be agile or nimble. In software we say agile a lot in terms of development, but that agility and nimbleness in your training program, right? Having some of these things set to standard, but having the understanding that business needs change, the needs of our organization are going to change. I think if I had said this three years ago, this would’ve seen really interesting and bright, but after COVID-19, I think everyone’s pretty much in alignment that the need for agility and to be nimble with ever changing needs is pretty standard now.

Don Spears

But we did find, and again, in that state of healthcare training staff development report, we found that for organizations, 33% of them found that their strength was being adaptable to those changing needs. Something that surprised us was that the online learning was at like 27% since the coronavirus pandemic began. And so the year before that it was a little bit lower, but it increased only two or 3%. So this is a pretty consistent thing, which is being adaptable, being willing to change, paying attention. And again, if you have a strong organization, a strong program, what you’ve done is you’ve created these levers where you can quickly roll out adjustments. So if you don’t have a prepared team that maybe have an emergency response team, right, or you maybe have a plan for, let’s say, if something unfortunate’s going to happen in a facility or a client’s home or something like that.

Don Spears

But what do you have as far as an organization in terms of your plan for when something major happens, and we suddenly need to train everybody, right? What is your organizational’s emergency change management plan? And that’s really what I’m talking about with agility and nimbleness. There’s the ever present something’s going to change as far as coding or something in clinical practice may change, but how do we quickly and efficiently roll out new ideas, new concepts, or modifications to existing business or clinical practices in an efficient manner. And that’s when we talk about agility, we’re not just talking about being ready for change. We’re about being prepared. It’s having those teams, those roles, those standards in place for how we’re going to quickly disseminate this information. Because again, at the end of the day, it’s standardization, if two people are doing things differently, we don’t have that good standardization. And we don’t necessarily have an even applicability of either the rules or the new requirements or performance standards or what have you.

Don Spears

The second thing I will say is that good strong training programs have alignment with business goals. If you’re looking for specific referral partners, if you’re looking for specific developmental areas for your staff, if you’re thinking about potentially taking on a new line of business, if you looked at PDPM or PDGM and decided that you wanted to adjust your case mix and take on maybe more wound care patients, your training needs to be in alignment with those business goals. We found in our survey that two thirds of respondents indicated that staff development training had a significant or major impact on top business goals. But oddly enough, just as many don’t see necessarily a direct ROI from their education. And we’ll talk about that maybe a little bit later, but to see that impact on business goals, you kind of have to find the way that you can align your training and outcomes and link them together.

Don Spears

If you’re not thinking about education and what you’re going to do as an organization, in terms of educating in alignment with those business goals, it’s going to be even harder to see that impact or that return on investment. It’s also very likely indirect. It’s very rarely that you’re going to say I’m going to provide funding, training, or budget for these specific nurses to become, let’s say, wound care certified and then suddenly be taking on more wound care patients and seeing some upside it’s generally going to be things like improving quality scores so that you’re a more attractive referral partner. I will say the thing that we saw that was really positive is that 58% of organizations are using staff performance as a measure of training impact. But it’s that last bit of connection. If my staff are performing at a higher degree and my quality measures are higher than I am really actually getting that ROI on that education, it’s just linking the two and thinking about them in conjunction.

Kim Broyer

That makes sense. And again, great stats that you’re able to share there. So the key factors really, if we go back to it, being agility, having that prepared team, standardization being important, and then being in alignment with business goals and ensuring that the training and education is funded appropriately. Based on all of that, do you have any information or suggestions on certain tools or resources that a provider should be using or could be using to really align with those factors?

Don Spears

Yes, of course. So there’s lots of tools or resources coming from an organization that specifically provides online learning. I will say that there are some benefits. I’m a big blended learning individual. There is just some training that happens live in person in the workplace, in front of people. It happens in the flow of work. There’s also, as I mentioned before, this idea of standardization. If you’re not creating materials and creating a repository of some sort, for those training materials for your organization, big or small, you don’t have to be employing 30,000 employees to require a need standardization. I would actually argue that standardization is important for a big organization, maybe differently than a small organization, but it’s still important. Big organization is a lot of employees. They want to apply the same standards across that organization so that it’s kind of like the McDonald’s cheeseburger, tastes the same everywhere.

Don Spears

I get the same quality dependent upon which office I go to. For small organization. Standardization is really important for scale, right? If you want to grow quickly and you want to apply the same standards, you have to be able to scale. And therefore having resources that allow you to provide standard training materials is really crucial to that growth. So there’s simple things like this, which is standardizing the training, right? If you have a PowerPoint that you’re using in one office, you want to use it the same office. If you’re having a PowerPoint that you’re using for one onboarded employee, you’re going to want to use it for the same onboard employee. But what we do find is that certain training when presented, you’re not going to train people the exact same way in a live setting every single time, the same way. In fact, this conversation happening tomorrow, we probably get a very different recording.

Don Spears

That means that we’re inconsistently, applying training to staff. And so there’s some things that are really better standardized and then let those experts train in those areas of development, focus on development programs, things like that. So I’m a big proponent of incorporating some form of online learning because it can help you standardize the things that are really important to standardize in a very seamless fashion. So things like compliance and maybe some basic clinical education, things like that, so that you can focus on the specific areas of growth. The second thing I would say is taking advantage of things like virtual live training could be helpful. Teaching the same thing on two different days, you’re going to use maybe different examples or pull in different analogies or maybe one day you were just real effective and the next day you weren’t.

Don Spears

Especially for organizations a little bit larger or organizations right now dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, having some concept around virtual life training, whether that’s a Zoom call or taking advantage of quite literally the virtual classroom technologies out there, they could be beneficial for maybe replacing some of that in person time you were so used to before the pandemic, but they can also be super useful in allowing you to provide that same message in a live fashion, but without having that sort of inconsistency of doing it on different days.

Don Spears

One. Online learning, right? Again, but always think about blended learning. It’s never going to replace the good old fashion just in time education or me turning around and asking my supervisor for some help, but it will help with standardizing, especially in high risk, high compliance areas. Taking advantage of some of the virtual life stuff, right? I think Zoom meetings are happening, but there’s a lot cooler technologies out there around virtual classroom that allow you to do breakout sessions to ask quiz questions, right? To really replicate the classroom experience. In fact, Relias use some virtual classroom training specifically for our own diversity, equity, inclusion initiatives, and that ability to do breakout sessions and share ideas and just come up with ways we could all work together better or maybe make changes in our organization were just huge.

Don Spear

And those just don’t happen outside of those sorts of environments. Consider that as not just part of your standup meetings, but part of how you train your staff. And then lastly, some form of data or analytics to inform how you’re assigning training. I think every time I say that the first thing people think about is, “Ah, we’re not a big organization. We don’t need those fancy business intelligence tools.” You don’t, your EHR provider can provide tons of data really quickly that could actually be super helpful for looking from an organizational standpoint at where your maybe areas of opportunity, maybe some areas of deficiency are. Even boiling it down to the CMS compare website. We know that CMS is pushing consumers to take a look at those websites, to let them be the way they make decisions about where they’re going to put their loved one or who they’re going to trust with their own care.

Don Spears

You can really quickly type in your zip code, you can look at how organizations around you are faring on those quality measures. And you can get some pretty good details around yours, especially those things that are outward facing or maybe important to referral partners. So you don’t necessarily need to maybe purchase a specifically sophisticated software. You could use your EHR provider, which something you’re likely already using. And if not, I would encourage you to use. And then something simple like the CMS compare websites, you could quickly bring in data analytics to inform your training.

Don Spears

Lastly, if you are using staff performance, look at that at whole scale. And individualistically, you can quickly identify areas of need by being able to pull reports on the whole organization or looking at their staff performance. And again, that’s another benefit for the learning management system. If you can run what’s we call them item analysis, but if you can look for example, at how the exam scores fared, or if you’re tracking things like competency checklist inside of a platform, you can quickly look across the organization and see those blind spots, and then think about them for the next year for training. So incorporate data in whatever way you can to improve your training. We found that only 32% of participants said that they were using data and analytic tools to inform staff assignments. So you’re not necessarily behind, but I would say that’s an important tool in whatever fashion you find it to incorporate for your training.

Kim Broyer

So you mentioned blended learning and standardization, a little bit about the virtual live training, suggestions and of course data, which is always important to providers. If we had providers large or small, no matter the size, really struggling in the area of training their staff, what would you have as far as recommendations or a clear assessment of what they could do when thinking about starting a new training program or optimizing what they have today? Any specifics that you would really want them to take a deeper dive into what they have today and what are some of the easy wins that they could have right away when assessing their current program?

Don Spears

Three easy wins. One is a budget. We found that in our survey, only 50% of respondents had a designated learning and development budget. It was actually higher in acute care than post-acute care of respondents had a budget. Get a budget and have someone responsible. Because again, if you’re not driving that culture of learning, if you’re not drive having those efforts and you’re letting them happen organically, you’re not maybe going to like the result you get. So one is have a budget. Two, develop key performance indicators. This can also be what’s helpful for tying that ROI or that business improvement. Determine what are your key performance indicators, those things you’re measuring to help improve the organization, but then also to kind of measure the effectiveness of training. If you have things that you’re going to measure, make sure that they’re right. And so to make sure that they’re right, you need an interdisciplinary team to help inform those needs.

Don Spears

And again, that’s frontline staff, that’s interviewing some CNAs and some nurses that’s working with some of your office workers, working with some of your allied health individuals, working with maybe finance or the folks you have working on referral partners. Identify your business goals, work with an interdisciplinary team to come up with the KPIs to help you get buy-in, that you’re measuring the right things. And then using those three things, you really can start to build out that program. Now I think the expectation, what I would’ve said is Google content provider something, but you got to start there. If you are not really effective in those areas, or if you’re starting fresh, that’s the great place to start. Get budget, identify what you want to measure, what your goals are, and then go from there.

Kim Broyer

Those are very helpful tips. I come across many individuals who are very passionate about training every day and really need to also consider, like you said, the budget measuring it and ideal buy-in across the organization. So who do you see as ideal leadership or even team members within post-acute care that should be involved in launching and keeping a training program going?

Don Spears

It kind of starts with the top, whether that’s your administrative or chief executive officers and nursing officers or chief people or human resource officers. Making this a priority. When you lay out your organizational priorities, if you don’t include learning and development or training or something like that, as part of a key business goal, again, it’s not going to be as apparent to individual contributors that that is important, right? So it’s got to start from that sort of top core function in terms of being a business priority. Secondly, in terms of team members that are important and should be involved, I kind of mentioned before that whole concept of interdisciplinary team. They’re great for interviewing on an annual basis. They’re great for reviewing immediate need basis what’s needed, but they’re also great for determining those challenging areas. And when we think about things like turnover, having some core internal, non-managerial leadership stakeholders in different segments, they can help you identify maybe potential blind spots in your leadership program, or maybe in your retention program or your clinical programs or compliance.

Don Spears

And so I would say usually the function falls under human resources or people, or maybe under clinical segment, could be both, could be splitting duties, but having individuals from those functions to lead these teams is usually what we see. And they seem to be the kind of standard practice. Having an L and D team working together from the clinical and maybe human resources elements, but working with the interdisciplinary team to identify problem areas, things like that. And again, that’s that kind of alignment across the business. If you’re working with the individuals working on your referral partnerships, what aptitudes are needed? What are we hearing from those referral partners that they’re looking for? What kind of aptitudes do we need? And then working across the business to determine where our blind spots are with developing those aptitudes.

Kim Broyer

Great information around leadership and team member involvement. So you mentioned human resources, which they are key to this, as well as maybe clinical leadership. And I know an area they’re focused on which we’ve highlighted a couple of times already in our conversation is around turnover. So they want to stop turnover. We want to ensure turnover is reduced in order to provide higher quality to residents and patients in post-acute care. Based on the high turnover and just the overall challenges with workforce in this area, how can optimal training programs help a provider with these challenges?

Don Spears

Yeah, absolutely. I came back from paternity leave back in September and one of the first things I read was a great article on the concept of the great resignation as they called it. One of the things that highlighted was this disconnect and the reason why I keep talking about that alignment and getting individuals involved is for example, I’m here. I was trained for three days or something and then took some annual education with an online platform, mostly compliance, but outside of requesting help from my office or something, there wasn’t really a lot of training. I was kind of figuring it out. I worked with other providers that were dealing with the similar concepts, but there wasn’t this concept of here’s where you go from here. And if you’re thinking about an aid, I worked in home and community based services for six years. So they lost a six year employee because I didn’t know what I was going to do with this information that I’d learned.

Don Spears

And I am sure there’s a track that I could have followed that would’ve kept me interested. There wasn’t a serious commitment to ongoing skills development, nor did I see my career path in front of B or what leveling up would be like. And so I was looking outside of healthcare for one, because I didn’t really have someone kind of helping groom me and helped me understand where my strengths were and where those could lead. I potentially could have become an occupational therapist. I wouldn’t have been necessarily in the same organization, but if I’d had that really nice trajectory with that existing organization and they definitely hired those occupational therapists, I probably would’ve considered them as an employer because I was used to them, I worked with them, they helped grow and develop me, but that was my experience. They potentially saw investing in staff as loss opportunity.

Don Spears

And if I invest in the staff member and they turn over, that’s lost revenue. But take advantage of those high quality staff members in providing them at education. Because while they do work for you, they do represent your organization and they do provide training. So don’t forget that they are still working for you and they still are providing healthcare services. And so you do need them to be optimally trained. So you’re not losing money by investing in them. But the optimal trained plan starts with solid onboarding. It continuously invests in employees education for their current role, and it helps them understand their next. And if you aren’t doing those three things, you are creating solid, easy exit points for staff, because if they do not see how they can have career and wage and opportunity grow in your organization, they will look for it elsewhere.

Don Spears

And I think a lot of times in the conversations I have this boils down to the well, they’re just going to leave for a nickel. Well, that should show you that they’re looking for those investment, those opportunities and those career growth paths. And you may not be able to offer that extra quarter, but if you can find ways to invest in them, keep them around a little bit longer, show them their path, when they maybe are no longer an aid and maybe an LPN, they’ll probably consider you as their employer of choice. Consider how those programs all work together and you’re not investing in them now, you’re investing in them then. And if you want them, then you got to invest now

Kim Broyer

Again, great suggestions. Thank you. So really with focusing on the high turnover and preventing that from occurring, it really starts with that solid onboarding, which includes training, the skill development and career path to ensure that they see a future within the organization. Being in technology, I often hear working with our customers, high turnover challenges, and especially with technology use that they have. So we’re often recommending super users or mentor factors, suggestions about they can take those individuals who really are looking for continued growth and continue to improve on their skillset through technology. So with that EHR technology is vital to the success of post-acute organizations today. Do you have recommendations on how providers can incorporate current tools or modify their training program to ensure this is a part of their ongoing staff education, again, really focusing around some of their technology that they’re using?

Don Spears

Yeah, of course. I will reiterate that EHR technology is vital to the success of a post-acute care organization. So if you’re not using it, do. But getting back to the question hand, if you can find a super user and you can record them performing a perfect documentation and input process and then provide it to everybody every time they join the organization and then provide those super users for support or questions or enhancement, you’ve standardized and then you have used your super user as a coach, you get to develop some leadership capabilities, you get to kind of help coach and develop those organizational standards. And if you’re a really good user and you believe in the program and the software that’s infectious, that that can develop. So I always kind of go back to standardization. If you can use tool tools that you have, like an LMS or whatever your training program may be, if you can find ways to standardize that education, whether your EHR provider provides that education, and there’s a way for you to incorporate it, or you develop your own repository.

Don Spears

Having that be standardized is extremely important. The second part of that is in the onboarding phase. Don’t let their first introduction to the software or just be hey, follow nurse around and see how they do it. Because again, the worst thing you can have is an ineffective user of your technology, teaching your next generation, the same bad habits that they maybe have as opposed to giving them a crisp, clean understanding of the organization’s needs, how to use the software, what are the standards, and then finding those super users who can coach good habits. It helps with preventing bad habits, I think LMSs or LXPs, where you can have that repository also available later for seeking answers is also super helpful. Because again, if they ask their neighbor and their neighbor’s not doing the right thing, they’re going to learn the wrong thing. And then now you have two people doing the wrong thing.

Don Spears

I would also add that for EHA technology sometimes the problem lies in other training. So also consider understanding if you do have some bad habits where those are fomenting, sometimes that’s just simply training on things like documentation. If you’re not inputting data correctly, it could be that it’s not necessarily users aren’t inputting data correctly. They’re may be just not documenting correctly. And those documentation habits are leading to bad input habits. So it might not be the vendors buttons in the wrong place or that the fields are confusing. It could just be that we’re taking the wrong notes and we’re not documenting correctly and then not inputting correctly. So think holistically, really dive in with individual staff members, understand where those issues are. Then you can drive behavior change and then change your standard training.

Kim Broyer

Thank you for that information. I know we’ve a lot through the conversation and you’ve been able to provide some great examples, really focused areas of improvement. Any tips for keeping training fresh and engaging as others consider updating their programs?

Don Spears

Yeah. If you’re going to go with something online and if you’re going to build your own, or if you’re looking for content providers, adult learning principles, these are adults. These are not students that are in K through 12. So adult learning principles is key. So for one, think about there’s tons of information available on the internet that can share what those are, but when you’re building your own education, which hopefully you are building your own and considering your own, because again, I mentioned that blended learning thing. So even if you do go online, still commit to using an online provider for some of the things that you want to do, but then also really focused on your organizational excellence by providing your own education and specific areas that you needed it important.

Don Spears

But the second thing I would say is involve your staff. If turnover’s a major issue and you want to know what the problems are and you really want to make sure that at least from a training perspective, that staff are getting what they need out of your learning and development programs don’t assume, ask. And then the third thing I would say is we’re back to the be nimble, be agile, prepare for the future. Have a plan in place for being prepared to ensure that you’re ready to make adjustments when needed. And that’s not necessarily major pandemic changes, that could just be simple quality of life changes or coffee programs or things like that.

Kim Broyer

Thank you. I really like how you commented on involving staff. So yes, I think that’s something to keep things fresh and engaging and ensuring that they’re including everyone with feedback of ongoing changes or really focusing on continuous improvement. And like you said, the agility, being able to really take the time to understand where training needs to improve and know that it is ongoing, that you can’t create training today and expect to use that same training in six months, but that it is really something that they’re continuously looking at. So with that, really want to thank everyone for joining us for another episode of the Post-Acute Point of View, we had a great topic, developing a robust training program, and I want to thank Don for sharing your insight with us. Thank you all very much.