Case Study: Teach 15,000 Physicians and their Staff to Use the Texas Electronic Death Registrar

Teach 15,000 Physicians and their Staff to Use the Texas Electronic Death Registrar

The Issue

Texas Health and Safety Code 193.005 became effective in 2008 and mandated that physicians, funeral directors, medical examiners, Justices of the Peace, and Local Registrars switch from an entirely paper-based system for processing Death Certificates and adopt the new Texas Electronic Registrar (TER) system.

A year after the bill was made law, only 30% of all physicians had made the conversion. While the electronic version simply replicated the paper system, physicians didn't want to change. Because the Texas Electronic Registrar software was unique, familiarity with any other software was irrelevant; there was no learned behavior to transfer. The challenge wasn't only one of skills training; it was in motivating the physicians to use the software.

The Vital Statistics Division Field Services Team had only four personnel to perform the much-needed training all across the state. 

The Solution

A team of three instructional designers mapped the process associated with correctly completing a death certificate in TER and created Captivate recordings of the process to illustrate its simplicity. At the same time, a knowledge-base of FAQs was created to provided information on-demand related to specific tasks in TER for quick and easy recall.

To motivate the physicians, the relevance of their own ethical principles as articulated by the American Medical Association (AMA) was incorporated into the training citing how TER applied and that they had an "ethical" responsibility to expedite the complete and accurate processing of all death certificates. To promote the benefits of TER, physicians and funeral directors provided video testimonials that were published on the Vital Statistics training portal. Today, the number of electronic filings is over 90% and growing. 

Problems Solved

• Training large, widely-distributed audiences
• Leveraging in-house training resources
• Demonstrating effectiveness of E-Learning
• Maintaining technology coherency, architecture, and security

For your convenience, this E-Learning case study is available for download below, or you can view demos of our E-Learning projects.

Have a question? Meet Heather Poggi-Mannis, our E-Learning evangelist. Heather has been working in the training industry for 12 years. Her technical background and previous experience includes a BSEE from the University of Texas at Austin, working for Texas Insturments Analog Devices, as well as product manager for a Computer Telephony Integration product line in the early 1990s. In each of these roles she provided outreach and training to both her internal and external clients.

Now Heather is dedicated to helping people find the right E-Learning solution for their organization. She'll take you through every step of the process from technology considerations to content development, all the way through to review, deployment, and hosting.