Absorb LMS aims to empower organizations to train employees with the skills needed to stay modern and relevant in today's fast-paced world. The LMS software focuses on aligning learning needs with business demands.
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HealthStream Learning Management System
Score 6.3 out of 10
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HealthStream is a cloud-based Talent Management Suite specifically designed for the healthcare sector. Focused on training (LMS), the suite also includes performance management, competency, simulation and credentialing. HealthStream also provides research services to healthcare organizations.
Absorb LMS has been incredibly well suited to our business needs. It is a robust platform with a wide ranges of tools, which make it easy to implement whatever training is desired. While there are many tools and options, the system itself is not overwhelming. The team we have worked with at Absorb (Jordan Wolf and Steve Ernstes) made onboarding, implementation, and continued customer support a breeze. The amount of support we received when we did encounter small issues was amazing.
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.
Overall, Absorb LMS is pretty easy to use for learners and especially for admins. It's practical to create and manage course content - it provides the most crucial options and yet is lean enough not to overcomplicate the admin's life. The consistent and customizable "table-view" in most of the admin-areas is very helpful and easy to follow.
Using Enrollment Rules, Absorb LMS let you define who a course applies to and how they get enrolled. You can build rules based on learner attributes, such as department, location job role, group, to include or exclude specific audiences. The way Absorb LMS is using enrollment attributes, no other LMS actually can fulfill our requirements easier. Enrollment rules are mainly embedded in individual course options (you can also create scheduled enrollments outside of the courses).
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.
The "And" and "Or" rules for self + automatic enrollment could be spelled out more to clarify who we're enrolling into courses
The thumbnail and poster "Upload photo" section is confusing. There should be a "Favorites" folder where we can easily find most commonly used posters and thumbnails
more education around Absorb analyze essentials
How the Featured courses section ranks courses is confusing on the back-end. I need to switch the primary one to second place to feature the new one first. But if the previous one now becomes second place, what happens to the old course that was in second place? I've noticed the order you select on the back-end for this isn't always reflected on user side
Same comment as Featured Courses but for appearance of billboards. Hard to position each in the right order
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.
We love the ability to have a user-friendly system that integrates well with our different HR interfaces (we have 3 systems that feed data/employees into the system). It makes it easy to track course completions and report out on metrics enterprise-wide. In addition, the ability to provide consistent education to staff who are geographically dispersed is a huge incentive for us, and Absorb LMS does this seamlessly.
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.
The system is very flexible, allowing admins to build dashboards that offer different UX and UI for different roles. The increase in usability is great for engagement and one-click actions. In addition to the dashboards, the admin interface is intuitive and allows managers to easily access reports for their teams.
We have never had any major issue with Absorb's availability. Any outages that have occurred have been planned an communicated. Any small issues that occur within the Absorb platform have been addressed efficiently and quickly by support and the development team
We have experienced infrequent issues with things like load times on reporting, or pages timing out, but for the large majority of our time within the system things have worked as they should
My client success manager had to reach out once for our company once. Although it was not an Absorb issue (it was an issue on the course vendor side), Absorb offered a resolution while the vendor was fixing the issue. We were very happy with the resolution and feel like Absorb went above and beyond for us.
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.
The training was comprehensive - there were existing modules to learn functionality but working with Absorb staff, and receiving recordings of those walk-throughs, made a rapid understanding of the LMS achievable and covered the necessary material that was needed and allowed for specific questions to be addressed.
The implementation of Absorb went very seamlessly. We previously had the Oracle LMS and importing user data and getting the new system up to speed was painless. The smooth transition helped leaders and staff gain confidence early in the application/company and we have had a successful partnership with Absorb since.
Absorb LMS is feature packed with small but smart elements (can have a username that isnt an email, can change the core language used in the platform, can change the font and layout) that offer greater security and accessibility for learners.
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
We have already scaled our LMS from a couple hundred users to 1000 users and have plans to scale even larger. We use the LMS across multiple internal departments. countries and user types. Absorb has made it easy to integrate and scale and we will continue to scale in the near future.
We work directly with Kirsten Spak, who has continuously provided timely and quality help for myself as the lead and our organization. Kirsten has helped us ensure that we are going about things as efficiently and is always willing to walk through things to demonstrate suggestions and functions. As we look to expand our offerings further, Kirsten has helped strategize for the best approach, which has helped our workflow and the end-user experience. As we are still relatively new users, but using the LMS every day, Kirsten has been very patient and provided clear instruction on processes when we were unsure of what to do and has been able to troubleshoot, with her team, functions that were desired but not availability at the time, to provide us with solutions.
We used Absorb LMS to track Annual Safety Training to ensure compliance with inspectors and ensure our teammates understand the risks and how to mitigate them safely. We were never able to track this before and thus, we simply didn't have mandatory annual training.
A huge drawback prior to implementation of Absorb LMS was our inability to offer more than our 40 purchased e-courses to our employees. These were mostly safety and equipment based courses, so we didn't have any soft skill development happening. Now we have hundreds of courses available from the Absorb library that cover the safety aspects, but we also have dozens of leadership courses, communication and influence courses, etc. It has been a huge gamechanger for our employees and their development opportunities! When I look at our course library, there are 400 courses, which over 300 being available through Absorb library (the other 80+ were made using Absorb Create).
