Contacts
Chris Ellgas, Children's Hospital Pittsburgh (412) 692-5340 Chris.ellgass@chp.edu		Kristy Johnston, CHCA (913)262-1436 Kristy.Johnston@chca.com
Peggy Dolan, South West General Health Care (440) 816-8068 pdolan@swgeneral.com

Hospital groups are using software from Mountain View-based ReadyGo to boost accreditation scores and swiftly teach new skills to healthcare workers.

“It was the easiest software we could find,” said Kathy Dancy, corporate educator for Novant Healthcare Systems. “As long as my trainers could read and turn on a computer, they could build a course tailored to their specific department needs.

Novant initially used an authoring tool based on Power Point for their online JCAHO training.  “Courses were boring, they weren't robust, and they looked awful”  Dancy said. “It was a nightmare transferring grades into PeopleSoft… Now we can create interesting, beautiful courses.”

CHEX Knowledge Exchange (CHEX), an educational consortium of 41 children’s hospitals, used ReadyGo Web Course Builder to quickly make information available about Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) to all its members, including 20,000 doctors.

“We knew we could create a course within 24 hours using ReadyGo,” said Kristy Johnston, vice president of marketing. “In less than 48 hours, we went from identifying the need for training to having a SARS course available to all 98,000 employees.”

Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh used ReadyGo Web Course Builder after Sept. 11 to develop a six-part Biomedical terrorism course, which is taken at the employees convenience, replacing eight hours in a classroom. 

They found e-Learning to be a boom for their off-site staff, including doctors with offices up to 60 miles from the hospital.

"The beauty of ReadyGo WCB is that we can prepare  it quickly" said Chris Ellgass , CHEX Coordinator & Systems Administrator at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh . "Our hospital  leadership  knows that  we have the ability to create courses on demand.  ReadyGo WCB comes in handy when new or unique  issues arise that need to be communicated to staff in a hurry."

At Southwest General Healthcare in 2004, all 2,900 employees prepare for JCAHO certification with nine safety “mini modules” of about ten minutes each.

“If we had to educate workers on four shifts, it would have taken more than three days to catch up with everyone and would have kept my workforce from attending to patient care” said Peggy Dolan, Manager of Education Services at Southwest General. Dolan estimated the safety training courses created with ReadyGo Web Course Builder saved the hospital up to $200,000 in the past year.