Innovative Compliance Training through Mindfulness

What you’ll read:

• Effective and innovative compliance training courses start with research
• A recent example of an award-winning and innovative compliance course
• Innovation elements established credibility, increased mindfulness, and encouraged reflection

Once you discover that it’s possible to roll out compliance training that is tailor-made for your learners, it’s hard to go back to a generic, cookie-cutter course. We agree—creating innovative compliance courses is way more effective than generic ones. The higher learner satisfaction rates and course effectiveness are just part of the package. That’s why AllenComm’s designers strive to make each of our compliance training projects a unique, targeted experience that fits the needs of specific learners. In this post, we’re going to lay out some of the innovative strategies we used to make this kind of next-level compliance training for Physicians Reciprocal Insurers (PRI), one of our clients in the medical industry.

PRI’s purpose is to provide malpractice insurance programs for physicians in nearly every medical discipline. In order to receive coverage through PRI, physicians must take a compliance training course focused on mindfulness in medical practice every two years, and PRI chose AllenComm to create a new and improved course for their clients. For PRI, a generic, off-the-shelf training simply wouldn’t work for their specialized group of learners (physicians) with very specific and important needs (improving clinical outcomes by learning and applying mindfulness in their everyday practice). To accomplish their compliance goals, PRI needed well-researched, highly customized, and high-impact training for their clients.

As we discussed in a recent post, the first step to creating effective compliance training for a specialized audience is research—we needed to immerse ourselves in the material and media that doctors are used to working with in their everyday practice. The second step, which we’re focusing on today, is putting that research to work and designing an innovative training solution that the target audience finds engaging, intuitive, and challenging in all the right ways. At AllenComm, we accomplished this goal in our course by establishing credibility, using familiar formats, and providing space for personal reflection, all in a way that resonates well with this specific group of learners and helps them do their jobs with greater skill and confidence.

Establishing Credibility: Videos

The last thing that busy, overworked doctors want to do is read through lots of long, dry, mandatory legalese about their insurance coverage. We know from experience that learners typically skim through that kind of content, resulting in low levels of comprehension and application. To make the course engaging and enjoyable, we explored video-based learning. Our course includes 47 short videos (with an average length of 1 minute 33 seconds) featuring insights and advice from established and respected medical professionals. Some of the featured speakers include Dr. Patrick Croskerry, MD, PhD, and Professor of emergency medicine at Dalhousie University, and Dr. Michael Krasner, MD and Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. These speakers have personal experience with the challenges of the medical industry, and their qualifications give them special authority among physicians taking the course. By including high-quality videos of trusted professionals in the field, we improve the likelihood of learners taking their important messages about mindfulness and compliance to heart.

Using Familiar Formats: Case Studies

In order to stay up-to-date on best practices, physicians regularly read medical journals and published case studies. Having discovered this in our research of the industry, we decided to adopt a similar format for many of our innovative compliance training modules in order to make the content more familiar and useful to learners. The overall message of our course is mindfulness and how practicing mindfulness on a regular basis can lead to better outcomes for patients and doctors alike. To communicate this in a practical, real-world way, we worked with PRI to develop 50 unique, multi-stage, and interactive case studies that demonstrate how mindfulness practices can lead to better outcomes.

Providing Space for Personal Reflection: Free Response Fields

The most powerful opportunity to practice mindfulness throughout the course comes in the form of free response text fields, where learners receive a short prompt and have open space to write and reflect on how the concepts in the course can be applied to their practice. There are 38 of these free response fields placed strategically throughout the course, and the prompts—like the example below—encourage the learner to pause and reflect before forging ahead into new content:

Pause and Reflect

Mindfulness has four qualities (critical curiosity, beginner’s mind, attentive observation and presence, as defined above). Describe a situation in your own practice where the deliberate use of one of these qualities might help you to see the patient more clearly and minimize cognitive bias.

These fields model good mindfulness strategies within the course itself so that when the training ends, the physicians already have plenty of practice using reflection as a way to increase mindfulness at work.

Conclusion

AllenComm’s course for PRI needed to help learners understand and apply mindfulness strategies that would help them improve performance and demonstrate compliance with the regulations of their malpractice insurance. To help them accomplish these goals, we leveraged specific language and media formats that the target audience would be familiar with, and we used engaging videos, case studies, and reflection fields to make mindfulness relevant and easily applicable to their professional practice. This innovative approach to compliance training points the way toward better, more effective training solutions that are built around specific learners and their unique professional and compliance needs.

We’d love to talk to you about your strategy for risk management or compliance. Reach out to us. We’d love to help you design a corporate training solution that gets results.