Halogen TalentSpace (discontinued) vs. HealthStream Learning Management System

I think it's a good platform for tracking and monitoring goals, feedback, and development. We don't use the 1:1 meeting feature, however, I can see how that would be valuable for many organizations. I do like that it is very customizable, however, that also presents problems in that sometimes forms and/or processes can be a bit challenging to create easily and quickly.

HealthStream is a wonderful tool for assigning assessments and evaluating knowledge. The assessments have a large pool of questions to pull from. The exams are timed and will generate a test report at the end of the exam so the clinical team can see what tests were passed and failed. These are helpful in ensuring we know what the nurse needs extra education on. HealthStream would be less suited for education items that would need to be validated in person...skills such as CPR.

Incentivized

• 1:1 agendas are easy to create, add comments to and prompt excellent conversation flow on the topics that truly matter to the manager and the employee.
• The system can be easily customized to reflect your company's language and culture. We did this in several areas of the platform (goals, development, learning), and it made a world of difference in the understanding and adaptation of our users. One example is that in each learning module, we added 3 questions in the course description so that managers would be automatically prompted to ask to follow up / learning transfer questions when their employees enroll and take a learning course.
• Halogen support is outstanding. Any question I have had has been answered upon the first contact or within 24 hours.

Incentivized

• Reporting. Having the ability to track compliance (and non-compliance) at our fingertips ensures that we are up-to-date with Federal, State, Local and internal policies, requirements and educational initiatives
• Customization. Developing in-house materials, specific to our variable training needs is a huge plus - HealthStream's commitment to SCORM-ready content since 2011 has made it simple for us to connect, engage and interact with all of our staff and providers.
• Integration. Allowing us to interface with our HRM/HRIS systems is invaluable. Keeping up with a dynamic workforce, both in terms of retention and attrition, would not be possible without our current interface structures.

• My organization does not use all of the functions/modules that Halogen offers, but I find that those modules still appear on the Halogen main page. I think a great area for improvement is to hide these functions so as not to confuse employees.

Incentivized

• Embedding elearning tutorials into HealthStream can be a bit complicated, and even slow down the site for the end user. In my experience, I found it much easier to just offer a link to the tutorial through the assessment portion.
• Keeping users synced into the most up-to-date user groups can be a bit tricky. If you create your own student groups, and then these students transfer to a different job role or department, you will manually have to make these changes yourself. A more automated process would be great.

Implementing a new system and process company wide is never an easy task. We moved so quickly in such a short period of time that we were able to learn quickly but also have the opportunity to improve the Halogen experience. We will more than likely will renew our use of Halogen as we already are seeing a small impact which hopefully in the long run will lead to a greater impact

Incentivized

We just can't imagine NOT having HealthStream as it has become such a part of our training system. The per user cost has actually gone down from 3 years ago. However, we are using more courses we have purchased. This allows us to be more efficient with our time and more convenient for the end users. We are considering purchasing other aspects of the system.

Halogen is very intuitive and provides very clean work-space ... lots of white space and modern layouts. There is more than one way to accomplish your action, too!

We only purchased the appraisal module and without the other modules offered, you are really limited in what you can do and the process becomes much more involved with needing to maintain information across multiple platforms. We found that they charge for everything and call it "consulting." We poured so much money and time into a system that was just overkill for what we really needed.

Incentivized

I only used HealthStream for a short time, but it wasn’t overly user-friendly or pretty. There were some quirks that I didn’t like, like the quiz builder or uploading lists. Whenever you assigned a group it was difficult to tell and confirm that the assignment went out. Overall I like other systems better.

Incentivized

It is very easy to use and I can do my own programming instead of paying a technician and waiting sometimes days for them to program the changes.

Get to know your CAM - Customer Account Manager! They are a lifesaver! (Thanks Jorie Basque!)

I have used other systems in the past and I like that Halogen provides everything in one space. I would like to see a more developed way to report training, not in the LMS, but I think that for the most part that Halogen is a robust system that is superior to its competition.

Incentivized

The interface for HealthStream is 1000x better than My Learning. I still struggle to find my assignments and upcoming in person training on My Learning. It is not intuitive and doesn't have a dashboard when you sign on to see everything at once. HealthStream lets me easily see my assignments, their due dates, and any upcoming dates

Incentivized

• We are able to get our reviews done in a quicker amount of time. Instead of 4-8 weeks we were able to get it done under a month.
• Halogen has gotten better at given us a heads up when the system will be down. Most patches are done overnight so we can at least verify it was done, but their success rate of a patch not breaking something is not at 99%. So we do lose productivity when the system is down.
• The tool is easier to do so there are fewer questions from users outside the core team.

Incentivized

• More efficiency. Easy way to implement training to a larger group of people.
• Helps to orientate new hires to our organization quicker.
• Consistency with training messages. We can communicate a method that can be easily adopted and implement across the organization.