Boston, June 16, 2003 – OutStart, provider of the only proven, content-centric software product family for learning, announced today that Kaiser Permanente is using OutStart Evolution to deliver up-to-date, consistent, targeted learning for 160,000 employees and physicians across its eight national regions.
Historically, each region of Kaiser Permanente created its own version of training because the organization lacked a single, national learning infrastructure. This resulted in massive redundancy of learning content, which was difficult to keep current and consistent across regions. Evolution, OutStart’s enterprise learning application, is helping Kaiser Permanente address these issues by:
Standardizing and streamlining how content is created across the organization.
Storing learning content as reusable learning objects (RLOs) in a single, central repository, so that it is easier and less expensive to update and maintain content.
Eliminating the redundancies and inefficiencies of creating multiple versions of the same content for every region.
Reusing learning content across its regions to ensure learners get consistent and up-to-date training that improves performance while satisfying regulatory compliance.
Assembling content differently for different regional audiences, ensuring that each learning experience is relevant for the learner.
“Healthcare is a heavily regulated industry that requires lots of ongoing, mandatory training,” said Mary Kay Russell, director, Enterprise E-Learning for Kaiser Permanente. “Evolution’s central repository and unmatched learning content management capabilities will make us more efficient and allow us to deliver more consistent, effective learning,” she said. “As learning content is available anytime, anywhere, our learners can access training at their own convenience, at home or in other settings, which is important because most of the people at Kaiser Permanente have their hands on patients, not necessarily on computers, throughout their workday.”
Evolution has also enabled Kaiser Permanente to centralize its training for HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliance. The company developed and stored national core HIPAA training content in its central Evolution repository, which is customized by local regions to support local regulations. Evolution assembles content differently for different learners based on roles and geographic regions. As a result, Kaiser Permanente cut what would historically have been 48 versions of HIPAA training, down to just four. It completed HIPAA training and certification for its 5,000 person IT organization, in less than three weeks, all without any travel or classroom training costs.
“Kaiser Permanente is a world-class organization with an extraordinary enterprise learning strategy that has a significant impact on its leadership within the healthcare industry,” said Massood Zarrabian, CEO and president of OutStart. “We are very pleased to play a role in the company’s cutting edge initiative to maintain peak performance and regulatory compliance by its employees and physicians.”
About Kaiser Permanente
Kaiser Permanente is America’s leading integrated health plan. Founded in 1945, it is a non-profit, group practice prepayment program with headquarters in Oakland, California. Kaiser Permanente serves the health care needs of 8.4 million members in 9 states and the District of Columbia. Today, it encompasses Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc.; Kaiser Foundation Hospitals; and the Permanente Medical Groups, as well as an affiliation with Group Health Cooperative based in Seattle. Nationwide, Kaiser Permanente includes approximately 134,000 technical, administrative and clerical employees and about 11,000 physicians representing all specialties.
About OutStart
OutStart provides a proven, content-centric product family for corporations seeking to increase individual and organizational performance to create a sustainable competitive advantage. Our content-centric approach enables an organization to transform its unique business knowledge into practical learning assets, deliver those learning assets to the right person, the right way, at the right time, and capitalize on those assets throughout the extended enterprise to drive sustainable competitive advantage.
OutStart’s learning software helps companies realize improvements in sales force and services productivity, call center efficiencies, customer and partner education and technology adoption. Founded in 1999, OutStart is headquartered in Boston and has offices in Atlanta, Chicago, Dublin, Lake Mary, Fla., London, Los Angeles, New York City, Raleigh, N.C., San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. For more information, visit www.outstart.com
