About Community Memorial Hospital

Community Memorial, an acute care hospital located in Hamilton, New York, serves a population of 45,000 across 27 communities. This award-winning rural facility has been nationally recognized for its performance. The esteemed healthcare system provides primary care, sophisticated orthopedic surgery, same day surgeries, and a complete roster of diagnostic testing and ancillary services. Community Memorial Hospital employs over 300 persons.

Challenges

Amy Dennis, Infection Prevention Nurse and Nurse Educator at Community Memorial Hospital, spoke with me about compliance training at their organization. Around 2010, the organization began looking for an online solution for their annual mandatory compliance training. At that time, they were holding live compliance training sessions spread out over a few-weeks period, requiring staff to be away from their work at inconvenient times—a factor that sometimes kept them from attending the training altogether.

Solution: Online Compliance Training

Dennis and her team began to look for a way to make participation in the training easier for staff members, especially for those who are on call and can take advantage of the training during their down time. Management chose InService Solutions learning management system to deliver compliance training to employees. The transition was smooth, with staff picking up on the new training pretty quickly. Even staff members who have little or no computer skills were able to successfully use this system with minimal assistance from trainers. Community Memorial Hospital now has 16 customized courses available for staff compliance training, ranging from courses on Corporate Compliance, Emergency Preparedness, and Fire Safety to HIPAA, Infection Control, and Patient Safety, just to name a few. The courses are available online to staff members 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Flexible Reporting Tools

Before the online solution, staff took quizzes on paper which were kept on file to record participation in trainings. With InService Solutions, everything is recorded within the system and can be printed as a report. Dennis finds the reporting tools easy to use and informative. She is able to track staff grades and course completion, which simplifies the process of meeting accreditation requirements. Dennis can tell who took what courses and uses these reports to look for trends, like which topics may need reinforcement. InService Solutions is helping Community Memorial Hospital meet regulatory requirements proposed by both the Joint Commission and the Department of Health, and evidence of staff compliance is now available anytime with a few clicks.

Image Source: CommunityMemorial.org