Cleveland Clinic Health System, East Region: Educate, Retain, Succeed

The Cleveland Clinic Health System's East Region (CCHS-East) is comprised of Hillcrest, Euclid, Huron and South Pointe hospitals, all of which are located within Cuyahoga County in northeastern Ohio. These four hospitals have more than 1,000 beds and offer a full spectrum of health care services. The CCHS-East hospitals were part of a group before becoming part of the Cleveland Clinic Health System, in contrast to the rest of the hospitals, which were not a network prior to the establishment of CCHS. "That meant we were already sharing many processes and services across the region," said Carole Hackett, chief learning officer at Hillcrest Hospital.

"We provide great value for our system because of our efficiency, and we do provide similar services across multiple hospitals, instead of having independent working functions that might be duplicating efforts at individual hospitals," added Tom Vernon, manager of human resource development technology at CCHS-East. "A lot of times when you talk about functions such as ours, a lot of the focus is on activity-based metrics for training in the education department. We are truly based on performance outcomes and improving organizational performance, and training is one of the products that we deliver to help meet those goals."

Health care regulations are a key driver of not only the development and delivery of educational content for the CCHS-East workforce, but also for verification of employees' comprehension of their duties, Hackett said. "In health care, all the regulatory agencies like the Joint Commission of Hospital Accreditation and the government are requiring more and more proof that we have a competent staff. We are getting more and more mandates externally to prove our staff has the ability to perform in order to meet these standards. Of course, our goal is to have the highest quality standards."

Training and development programs at CCHS-East are built according to a performance-based consulting model, which means organizational learning leaders confer with strategic business partners on initiatives. "We don't just react at that point in time and develop a training solution," Vernon said. "Just because someone's requesting training, it doesn't mean that's the most appropriate solution for whatever they need training for. We would only develop training to begin with if we thought there was a learning deficit - if there was another environmental factor or a lack of feedback. We have a pretty good idea of what the actual skills are to meet the business needs on the job. We want to make sure we identify clearly what those behaviors are, so that by the time we develop the educational curriculum and track the people who go through those offerings, we know that the content is tied to a specific business need."