Deseret Health Group
Deseret Health Group by the Numbers:
Employees: 1,068
Courses Completed in 2010: 3,516
Compliance Rate, 2010: 68%
Client
Deseret Health group manages 24 long term care communities in Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Utah. Deseret is growing quickly, having grown from 15 communities to 24 in the last year and continuing to expand its properties.
Before using Silverchair, Deseret’s employees attended monthly in-person inservices; licensed employees also attended off-site conferences in order to attain CEs. Attendance was tracked manually via a sign in sheet.
Challenges
Like many senior care organizations, Deseret needed to make their training consistent across its growing workforce and provide a system for organizing, tracking, and reporting on training. Skyler Robertson, Deseret’s Business Operations Director, says, “We brought on Silverchair to make sure we had the clinical component of our training covered.”
Skyler was also looking for a way to automate common business practices, like orientation and communication about company policies. He saw the potential in Silverchair’s system to help him automate and streamline those processes.
Results
Bringing online learning into Deseret helped to initiate a culture of consistent training and ongoing education among staff. “We’re trying to develop a formal training process here and most of our buildings are culturally on track to do that,” Skyler says. Compliance is driven via stand-up meetings with department heads. “We look at the compliance reports at these meetings to see where we need to improve,” he says. Skyler has also worked to brand Silverchair internally to encourage use and acceptance of the system as both a training system and an information delivery system. “I’m encouraging all departments at our corporate level to get into the system and use the training as well,” he says.
Once Deseret felt that their clinical training needs were met, Skyler began to focus on using Silverchair to automate general business procedures. “We wanted continuity and systemization of all of our business processes, and we’re using Silverchair to accomplish that,” he says.
Skyler used Silverchair’s Authoring Tool to create custom courses for Deseret and began posting courses on several processes, including how to access emails and the company policy manual. Deseret also plans to add other frequently-accessed information like workers’ compensation claim forms, training on other systems (like billing), and benefits information. “I want to have a 30-day notice sent to all employees in Silverchair to make them aware of open enrollment periods. New hires would receive a message about our benefits package, costs, etc.”
Using Silverchair for information and training is also helping Deseret with their risk management efforts. “We can foster a culture of safety and injury prevention,” Skyler says. Deseret plans to offer training on injury prevention as well as surveys and observation sessions to ensure employees are lifting properly and using other correct methods: “We can track safety issues in Silverchair and see where additional training may be needed.” Keeping everything in one place, with tracking and reporting, also allows Skyler to establish accountability at all levels: “I can’t hold anyone accountable if I haven’t educated them on the right information.”
Deseret has also found Silverchair to be a valuable tool in developing in-house talent. For example, Skyler mentions that finding someone with knowledge of medical billing in long-term care can be a challenge; by creating custom courses that cover this knowledge—and the proprietary knowledge needed to apply those skills at Deseret—the company can build talent internally and promote from within. “That’s a big value of Silverchair and a home run for us if we can train an existing employee for a position. It brings turnover and recruitment costs down, and we know that the resident care will be done properly from the start.”
As a growing company, consistent communication is important and Silverchair has been valuable in that respect as well. “It’s getting easier to go through the acquisitions process with an automatic way to deliver information,” Skyler says.
Conclusion
Deseret was able to take Silverchair’s training system beyond the basics and use it to deliver timely and consistent training and communications. “We’re starting to get a better picture of what Silverchair can do and the benefit it brings,” Skyler says. Using the Authoring Tool to deliver Deseret-specific training and information has initiated a process of streamlined communications, and Skyler plans to continue the automation: “We want to make Silverchair the primary method of delivering information in our company.”
