Master of Education in Instructional Design and Technology Plan II Graduate Projects

Abstract

The problem of the study was that there was a need to provide additional training to employees of the Information Systems (IT) Department of a regional hospital in the utilization of the Non-Procedural Report (NPR) writing function of the hospital’s Healthcare Information Systems (HIS). The current methods of NPR training lacked structure and depth and did not fulfill the needs of the IT staff to be able to focus on the proper actions needed to produce reports. The design and development of the blended learning module Creating Your First NPR Report was created to fill that need and provided an effective way for IT staff to adopt efficient strategies for learning NPR report writing skills and thus providing a valuable service to the hospital departments. The study had systems analysts as participants from the IT department.

The preliminary assessments establishing departmental reporting requests, software research, and learning needs for IT staff was achieved through a series of departmental question and answer sessions, software research, and an IT Staff – Knowledge Survey. The obvious lack of understanding of the basic principles of NPR report writing prompted the purpose and objectives for designing a blended learning module.

During the implementation of the blended learning module, a face-to-face, instructor-led session was conducted with the use of a PowerPoint presentation and hands-on demonstrations, which helped reinforce the correct way of designing NPR reports. The just-in-time information was provided along with reinforcing video presentations that helped the participants gain valuable knowledge about NPR report writing.

A post survey was conducted as an evaluation tool for the instructional methods used in each of the blended learning techniques. Performance and production of the NPR report from the face-to-face instructor-led sessions also served as another method of evaluation. The results from the survey reinforced the need for the blended learning training. An outcome of the study was the implementation of the blended learning training module given to other participants of the IT department and future modules that will help IT Staff create more robust reports for hospital departments.

Publication Date

Fall 12-8-2014

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