Innovation, technology take center stage at annual celebration

Innovation and technology were front and center at the Education and Research Celebration, March 31 – April 1 at the John H. Ammon Medical Education Center. The annual event of the Christiana Care Learning Institute provided an opportunity for educators to share ideas, be inspired and reflect on Christiana Care’s journey in achieving the health system’s third consecutive ranking among the Top 125 learning organizations selected by Training magazine.

“It’s a huge honor because the Top 125 crosses industries, and we are number one among health systems,” said Rosa Colon-Kolacko, Ph.D., MBA, senior vice president, System Learning/Learning Institute, and chief diversity officer. Overall, Christiana Care ranked 28th in the Top 125, the premier learning industry awards program.

Staff education and striving for continued improvement in providing expert, respectful care in ways that patients value “all map back to The Christiana Care Way,” said Robert J. Laskowski, M.D., MBA, Christiana Care president and CEO.

Timothy J. Gardner, M.D., executive director of the Value Institute and medical director of the Center for Heart & Vascular Health, said the ultimate goal of education and research is to improve the delivery of care. The Value Institute is Christiana Care’s pioneering initiative to study health and health care to identify and implement strategies that achieve better health outcomes at lower costs. “What you do after training is more important than what you do during training,” said Art Kohn, Ph.D., founder of AKLearning, who was the keynote speaker of the two-day event.

Kohn said that reinforcing training is essential because 70 percent of all new information is forgotten within 24 hours. He advocates “boosters” to help embed learning in the brain. That might begin with sending learners multiple-choice quizzes on the training information via mobile phone. Over the next two months the questions would become more detailed, leading up to detailed feedback from learners on how they put their training to use.

More than 30 Christiana Care employees and teams were honored with trophies that acknowledged their accomplishments in education and research. Before the awards luncheon, staff had a chance to explore stations set up to showcase technologies such as Google Glass, a wearable computer with an optical head-mounted display, and VoiceThread, a cloud-based application that helps users to create conversations around documents, videos and other images.

Jeff McKinstry, systems training, checked out Prezi, an interactive program for online quizzes and tests.

“I am always interested in seeing new tools, and this is a great opportunity to check out a number of new things,” he said.

Bob Sleezer, medical photography manager, took a quick tutorial in Jing, screenshot and screencast software that makes it easy to share images and short videos.

Several Knowledge Now sessions drew more than 200 participants who learned tips for using Windows 7 and Lync, how to produce a simple video, how to write effective abstracts and how to make use of online learning. Other sessions addressed generational differences in learning and tools to evaluate different levels of learning.

Christiana Care Way Learning and Research Awards 2014