Invest in Your Team: Learning Management Systems and Employee Growth

There are several reasons why finding the right people, training them, and keeping them engaged is more imperative than ever for HME providers.

• By Mike McKillip
• Nov 04, 2020

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Hiring and retaining the right people for your business in the healthcare industry is essential. With multiple and complex regulations, lean margins, and clientele sometimes with multiple disabilities, finding skilled and experienced personnel presents challenges.

In an industry that requires personnel to have both clinical skills and service orientation, finding people who care, not only about patients but also about your company’s profitability, is most important. Finding the right people, training them, and keeping them engaged is more imperative than ever.

In addition, the Durable Medical Equipment (DME) industry is expected to grow. The U.S. DME industry, valued at approximately $41 billion in 2016, is anticipated to grow more than 6.8% from 2017-2025.¹

So, let’s explore why it is important to invest in employees and have the most competent and talented workforce to meet these challenges. Here are five reasons why investing in employee training programs is good for your business:

• Attract and retain great talent. By training your staff through employee development programs, you may overcome some hurdles in hiring and retention that many organizations experience. For example, by sponsoring sales training programs, your salespeople can gain insights to improve their selling skills as well as develop their confidence and positive attitude at work.
  
  
• Identify which employees are worthy of promotion. Trained employees, who have developed certain levels of competence, can form your pool of candidates for possible future promotion.
  
  
• Increase employee engagement. Your willingness to invest in your employees' training and development will likewise inspire them to invest as much hard work as they can into your business.
  
  
• Create savings for the company. The most effective training programs are those that empower employees to become multiskilled, extending their skill set across various areas.
  
  
• Shape the future of your organization. As you make employee training and development programs part of your organization, you will need to continuously update your offerings.²

Regardless of how you implement your program, it will require education suited for the adult learner. Adult learning theory tells us that adult learners recognize the need to acquire relevant knowledge to be successful. Your challenge is to associate their assigned tasks to their learning objectives. Again, a learning management system, with prewritten content, recognizes those needs and the content respects the adult learner’s specific style of learning.

To put continuing education and training in perspective, let’s look at the adult learner and how to create successful outcomes. With learning management systems on the market, managing the education expectation is easier than ever. Everything can be set up quickly in a learning management system, allowing the system to deliver reminders and prompts throughout the year. Whoever manages the system will monitor each person’s progress and can make slight adjustments during that period.

Good managers will encourage development and continuing education in the resolve to improve their employees’ ability and flexibility. With employee turnover in the HME industry over 60%³, and industry growth expected to be over 6%, you cannot afford to have people leave. With costs related to departure and lost production and increased workload on existing employees, replacing anyone on your staff is a costly endeavor.  

Learning management systems that provide education to the industry consider these issues and more.  A “one-size-fits-all” approach will not work because of varying degrees of knowledge your clinical versus non-clinical employees possess. With a learning management system like HealthTrainU™ accessible to you at affordable rates, do not leave one of the most important elements of your new employees’ growth to chance.

Hiring and retaining the right people is just one component of any business, regardless of the industry. As a provider, you are required to do more. If you have a learning management system and aren’t using it, start. If you do not have an education and training plan in place, get one. If you use a learning management system and facilitate a continuing education and training program — congratulations, you have passed with flying colors!

1. https://thedailychronicle.in/news/1990733/u-s-durable-medical-equipment-dme-market-potential-growth-size-share-demand-and-analysis-of-key-players-research-forecasts-to-2027

2. https://www.business.com/articles/why-businesses-should-invest-in-employee-training/

3. Private Duty Benchmarking Study conducted by Home Care Pulse