The Best LMS for Healthcare

LearningLight

To larger organisations, we would strongly advise shortlisting some of the following vendors when looking for the best LMS for healthcare providers, medical education, product, service companies, and for medtech or telemedicine training.

Following on from our article on How to Choose Healthcare Learning Management Systems, we present our recommendations, but in no strict order of preference. Established, large, full solutions are shown first, then more niche offerings for smaller organisations or tactical deployments, and finally two LMS with a strong position in Knowledge Management.

Totara Learn LMS

Totara is a well-established platform for helping large and complex organisations with their learning requirements. It has now evolved into a complete, integrated talent experience platform, comprising the Totara Learn LMS, plus the Engage learning experience platform and Perform performance management system.

Totara is widely used across many industries, but is especially popular within the healthcare sector. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, 44 new clients chose Totara in 2020 alone to help with their learning and performance management needs.

The benefits of the Totara Learn LMS for healthcare training include:

Strong compliance management features, including nudges and alerts for both learners and administrators, to help everyone become and stay compliant
Multitenancy – creating customised learning experiences for different groups
Powerful data gathering and reporting to meet medical competency and compliance requirements without the need to switch between multiple systems
Extended enterprise – for delivering training experiences to 3rd parties outside your core organisation.

Totara is used by healthcare organisations large and small, including various UK NHS hospital trusts, private medical companies in the US, the National Ambulance Service of the UAE, and many more worldwide.

Learn more about the Totara Learn LMS or see more detail about the powerful and flexible healthcare elearning solutions from Totara on their website.

Enable from Virtual College

Virtual College have been in the LMS business for over 20 years and have developed unrivalled expertise and as such has one of the most evolved LMS solutions we know. Their continued investment into the platform is impressive and it meets our metrics.

In addition, Virtual College have a dedicated team devoted to healthcare and have rolled out several exciting e-learning content and LMS projects. This is a full feature LMS and auditing and reporting is very strong, competence management functionality is also very good and Enable LMS is very robust to support scaling.

EthosCE LMS from DLC Solutions

DLC Solutions produces the EthosCE LMS. This is a US based company, producing a very content orientated LMS with authoring capability built in and some learning content management functionality. The Mobile Smartphone Application for Live Meeting Attendance Tracking is an interesting feature and CCGs holding CPD events would find this feature of considerable benefit.

EthosCE is a purpose-built learning management system for medical associations, health systems, academic medical centers, and medical education providers.

The EthosCE LMS platform appears to be very popular within the Pharmaceutical industry, and with Medical Training providers utilising its e-commerce solution to charge for training.

Day One

Based near Leeds in West Yorkshire, UK, Day One Technologies create elearning solutions that are bespoke to the needs and specific environment of each client. In developing LMS, they use a unique modular approach that gives clients a system that is easy to use with all the features they need, without the bloat of anything superfluous.

Despite getting a stripped down, simple LMS, the platform always has additional modules available for future enhancement, making it a fully future-proof learning management system.

For over 20 years, Day One have provided leading elearning solutions to high profile clients, and they are now working on some important and innovative projects for the likes of NHS Scotland, Mind (the leading UK mental health charity), Datix, HCA, Scottish Government, and the Royal College of Physicians. Click here to learn more about their healthcare elearning solutions or call them on +44 (0)1924 510 524.

There is also a useful post on eLearning for Telemedicine Training over on their blog. This will become an increasingly important topic as many healthcare providers have been moving to remote patient consultations due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Kallidus

The Kallidus LMS has great pedigree and track record and is well evolved and configurable for use in healthcare. Kallidus is a well – developed LMS that provides the full feature set we looked for in our review.

Kallidus offers a full learning and talent suite that is one of the most comprehensive in the market offering a full e-learning and training solution. Kallidus Learn LMS is well developed and is particularly effective in scheduling learning and is successfully deployed in several NHS bodies.

Docebo

Less well known in the UK, but this is an LMS that merits serious consideration. Docebo is a very good LMS and it is leading in extended enterprise functionality which we see as an increasingly important requirement in healthcare.

Docebo are certainly innovators in the LMS market with a continued commitment to launching new features with a very strong focus on integration and apps. The Docebo LMS is fully mobile compatible and is one of the leaders in mlearning and Apps.

iSpring

Established for over 17 years, iSpring is a leading LMS provider with an excellent record of delivering elearning solutions for the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries.

Their impressive client list includes Pfizer, Allergan, Cardinal Health, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson. Read more about their work with these clients and others on the iSpring website.

Read our review of iSpring Suite Max, which provides a complete solution for elearning content development.

Enterprise Study

A very impressive and full feature set LMS well represented already in NHS healthcare with its ability to integrate third party training provision and powerful workflow and audit capability this is another LMS that offers the required features and more.

Integration is very well developed allowing Enterprise Study LMS to integrate with existing workflows and manage multi departmental budgets reflecting the company’s expertise in training management and workflow design and business modelling skills.

Lighter touch solutions for smaller organisations or more streamlined tactical learning projects in larger organisations.

For more mid-sized organisations we would add some other LMS recommendations for lighter or more tactical solutions (that also could be used by larger organisations for tactical training interventions). These deliver more training focused solutions or more innovative solutions where challenges and requirements are more nuanced, such as learner engagement, course building and content curation and knowledge management, to name but a few challenges faced by healthcare organisations.

aNewSpring

aNewSpring is the Training department’s LMS! A feature rich LMS focused on training delivery, learner engagement and the creation of training materials in a quick and efficient way. This is designed to be a blended learning platform, and it offers a neat way for both curating and creating elearning courses. The curation function is very impressive and allows disparate learning resources to catalogued and used in multiple courses.

The aNewsSpring powerful in built LCMS (Learning content management function) allows for the use of individual learning assets across multiple courses and of course their withdrawal and updating.

The content creation allows for building materials and testing materials for differing sizes of screens, and it has some neat tricks to ensure learners remain engaged…memo trainer is neat little tool that provides reminder quizzes to mobile devices to re-inforce learning, based on a sophisticated settable adaptive learning algorithm.

In addition we would highlight up LMS solutions more focused towards knowledge management

KOKM

Kokm is a relatively new player in the LMS market and it offers an original take on the genre. Rather than being only a classic Learning Management System, the Kokm package includes an intranet, an extranet, a resource library and an LMS. There is a lot of interesting technology and experience behind this platform.

This means that Kokm provides a holistic solution for the healthcare organisation that wants to procure, update, or replace its intranet, extranet and resource library. However, this could also pose a challenge if an organisation is happy with its current non-LMS systems.

Kokm also offers an interesting take on scalability. One of Kokm’s strengths is that it benefits from learners contributing to the system with their learning experiences, pictures, videos and other multimedia resources. If you think the learners in your organisation will contribute to and share their learning, then Kokm offers a really interesting opportunity.

The final vendor to note is Tribal in our review of the market:

Tribal

This company has delivered one of the largest elearning-led deployments into the NHS (The Southwest Strategic Health Authority was the original customer), with a huge amount of learning resources made available as part of this project and have partnered with eXact a leading LCMS vendor that already plays a role in the NHS ESR infrastructure.

Tribal Group have considerable expertise in LMS, though we have not reviewed this product we are aware of their considerable skills in bespoke platform development and information systems.