The Department of Defense Military Health System’s learning-management system, MHS Learn, fits into existing websites, looks and feels like the original interface, houses educational courses and training, and tracks course interest and completion metrics.
Navy Capt. Judith Bellas, director of Business Systems, Defense Health Services Systems, presented information about MHS Learn at the 2011 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Conference Feb. 20th – 24th held in Orlando, Fla. Bellas told the audience that her experience working in joint military environments revealed the many similarities in training missions across organizations.
“I’ve had the opportunity to work with other services, outside of Navy medicine,” Bellas said. “I trained with the Army for three months. We lived together, we worked together and we trained together. I worked for an Air Force colonel who worked for an Army general. We often had the same needs and the same concerns.”
MHS Learn offers the ability to collaborate on and share training programs from the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs, and has been integrated into the existing websites for myHealtheVet, the Military Health System and the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. The learning platform will launch on eBenefits in late March.
Catering to service members as well as both civilian and military health care providers, MHS Learn allows practitioners to stay up-to-date on regulated training and also take continuing education and self-paced classes. Although the number increases regularly, there are more than 1,200 courses currently available.
DOD/VA collaboration on training programs and educational courses is cost-effective, reduces concept-to-delivery time, cuts redundant training and delivers dynamic and interactive training repositories. It also expands the collective pool of courses available to the services and the VA.
MHS Learn proves cost-effectiveness by decreasing labor associated with developing and holding training courses and reducing course redundancy across the system. An average course costs approximately $75 per hour to develop and teach, while courses offered through MHS Learn average about $10 per hour. By using MHS Learn, the military services can collaborate on desired course content and share the development cost of a single online course.
Previously, courses were often developed independently of similar coursework across the DOD or VA and taught in person, which reduces a provider’s time with patients and requires that each service pay associated labor and venue costs.
If MHS Learn continues to reach its intended audiences, the DOD and VA expect to save $25 million annually by 2016.
The HIMSS Conference is an annual event bringing together health information technology industry leaders. Learn more about the conference at www.himssconference.org.