St. Cloud Hospital Standardizes Training With Pathlore

With Pathlore’s LMS – software that standardizes the way employees learn, and measures what they know – the Minnesota hospital is consolidating the organization’s tracking and reporting of mandatory training. St. Cloud Hospital, located in St. Cloud, Minn., is also ensuring that training complies with the regulatory requirements mandated by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (HIPAA), the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and the Minnesota Department of Health.

Pathlore’s LMS has the power to not only manage the delivery of corporate education, but also track who’s completing training. And the 489-bed Catholic hospital, part of CentraCare Health System, will use the LMS to ensure its employees complete an array of mandatory classes. That is critical when, for example, government agencies ask for proof of compliance with laws like HIPAA.

In a November 2002 report on the state of HIPAA compliance among health care organizations, technology research firm Gartner Group found that 70 percent of those surveyed hadn’t yet identified a “formal employee training methodology.” In contrast, St. Cloud Hospital identified HIPAA training needs by job position and then used Pathlore’s wares to track compliance by unit and person.

“We’ve never had a problem with compliance, but were likely spending too much time proving that fact,” said Roxanne Wilson, director of education and resource management “Our LMS will allow us to record the mandatory courses our people take, put it in one place, and make it available to us through the report writing capabilities of the Pathlore System.”

Along with tracking compliance, the LMS can assign employees a training curriculum, which becomes a part of their professional goals and personnel files. For managers, the LMS automatically handles “wait lists” for classes, checks prerequisites, queues letters to remind employees to take classes, and updates student records. St. Cloud Hospital has plans to make these tools available to its employees, too.

“We were managing this sort of thing through separate computer applications or by hand, and there wasn’t a lot of time left over for analyzing training against goals,” adds Jon Tufte, facilitator of organizational development. “Moving to an LMS is like replacing a compass with a global positioning system.”

Beyond tracking and analyzing what workers are learning at St. Cloud Hospital, there is another goal: Give workers the ability to choose the best time to take a course. With the LMS online “student-learning center,” hospital employees will be able to review their training goals, track their progress and sign up for classes.

“Hundreds of our customers who started with Pathlore’s Registrar product have upgraded to Pathlore LMS because the total cost of ownership is less than any competing product,” said Steve Thomas, president and chief executive officer of Pathlore. “Moving from Registrar to Pathlore LMS is simply a matter of building on a foundation that already exists.”

St. Cloud Hospital is one of more than 100 hospitals and health care networks Pathlore counts as customers.

The technology behind Pathlore’s LMS includes an n-tier architecture, which allows, among other things, Web-based delivery of courses. The system’s database-server tier leverages standard RDBMS technology such as Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle.

About Pathlore

Founded in 1995, Columbus, Ohio-headquartered Pathlore develops software that manages, tracks and reports on corporate training. Customers use Pathlore’s products to increase sales, comply with government regulations and adhere to quality initiatives. The privately held company’s client roster includes Delta Air Lines, NEC America Inc., Novartis, PNC Bank, Southwest Airlines, more than 100 hospitals and health care providers, and government agencies in over 30 states such as California, Ohio and Texas. Pathlore also has offices in Australia, Italy, New Zealand and the United Kingdom. More information about Pathlore is at http://www.pathlore.com.

Pathlore is a registered trademark of Pathlore Software Corporation. All other registered and unregistered trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective owners.