Penn Medicine: Content Controller case study

The University of Pennsylvania Health System (aka Penn Medicine) is a world-renowned health organization focusing on research and outstanding patient care. Recently, Penn Medicine Academy, the health systems’ organizational development and learning branch, wanted to reimagine their learning ecosystem and centralize their content to make learning and training for each of their three branches (University of Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania Health System and the School of Medicine) easier to access.

The challenge

Penn Medicine Academy, creates and tracks training ranging from leadership, development, workforce planning, change management, and everything in between. When reimagining their learning ecosystem, they needed a way to easily distribute centralized training developed by their instructional designers as well as other regulatory and optional off-the-shelf courseware to their learners. They wanted to ensure that employees working in both the university and the health system weren’t assigned the same courses twice, which could cause employee frustration and potential compliance concerns.

Since their learners are working in a highly regulated industry, it was important that the solution reliably tracked training and completions while providing reports showing who is in compliance and who hasn’t completed the course. In the healthcare industry, a non-compliance regulatory violation could result in a citation, fine, or even closing unit beds, if proof of compliance isn’t provided in a timely manner.

The solution

Ultimately, Penn Medicine Academy chose Content Controller as their centralization and compliance data tracking solution. Content Controller allows Penn Medicine to have one source of truth for all of their in-house and off-the-shelf courseware. In addition, they were able to transition between Learning Management Systems more easily and are now able to ensure all learners, regardless of which arm of the university they’re taking training with, have access to the latest course version.

The benefits

Centralizing all their courses into one platform
With Content Controller, both the university and the health system are able to upload, manage and track all their training content in one central location.

Tracking regulatory and compliance training
With Content Controller’s reporting and analytics capabilities, Penn Medicine is able to track who has taken which course version. This not only removes the possibility of duplicate course completions, but when they need to provide information for an audit, they’re able to find and provide that information quickly.

Distributing content to each branch and LMS is easier than ever
In 2023, the University of Pennsylvania changed LMS vendors, which led to the university and Penn Medicine having different LMSs. Content Controller provides a simple way to distribute courses into each LMS to reach each branch with a single source of truth.

Future-proofing LMS provider changes
By uploading their content into Content Controller, Penn Medicine and the university were able to more easily transition to the new LMS and become LMS-agnostic. If they decide to change vendors in the future, their content will continue to stay in Content Controller, and they’ll avoid all of the common LMS switch pain points.

Ensuring learners can always access the latest course version
Due to regulatory and training concerns, Penn Medicine didn’t want to continue with their old way of course versioning: make the change, download the course, send a .zip file, and then reupload into an LMS. With Content Controller, updates are immediately available to learners to avoid the possibility of versions getting out-of-sync.

The results

In their first year of using Content Controller, Penn Medicine has already:

• Saved time versioning. Before Content Controller, publishing and processing course updates took at least an hour. Now, that process is less than a minute.
• Reached over 60,000 learners across their organizational branches.
• Created a better user experience and received fewer support tickets overall through improved testing capabilities.
• Provided a more seamless learning experience for approximately 4,000 team members that are within multiple LMSs.
• Made content management, testing and reporting much easier and more efficientfor their 40 learning team members.