16-hospital health system OSF HealthCare, based in Peoria, Illinois, has put together mandatory education for all 24,000 employees. It has a deliberate strategy behind making sure everyone – from the custodian to the CEO – is aware of the power of generative AI.

THE PROBLEM

Adopting generative AI as quickly as possible is extremely important to OSF HealthCare. Like all nonprofit health systems across the country, it runs on thin operating margins with workforce shortages expected to persist for at least the next decade. In addition, clinicians are continuing to recover after COVID-19 and face burnout from the increased administrative burdens.

"We must seek every opportunity to improve efficiency, productivity and work smarter with the resources we have," said Melissa Knuth, vice president of planning at OSF HealthCare. "We've all read about the great promise of generative AI on the transformation of healthcare, but actually getting to that future state is challenging. We need the power of the entire workforce pushing on the same side of the rock to reap the rewards.

"While we understood our generative AI education needed to be mandatory across our health system, we also understood people have a reduced attention span," she continued. "Traditional education modalities were not going to work for this. We have variation in the knowledge base across the workforce and we needed to provide education to everyone from transporters and housekeepers to surgeons."

The health system also had an aggressive timeline for completing the education – approximately six weeks, due to the prevalence and availability of generative AI tools publicly.

"We knew people across our workforce were using these tools personally and in the workplace," she said. "We needed to ensure they understood the organizational rules of the road with regard to the use of generative AI tools at OSF HealthCare. We wanted to educate about the potential benefits and the potential pitfalls to avoid.

"To rise to the challenge before us, we took lessons from social media on how to grab someone's attention and hold it for short snippets of time (1-2 minutes) to communicate our key messages," she continued. "We used mixed media to keep the content interesting and we used generative AI tools to assist with the content creation."

PROPOSAL

OSF HealthCare knew the first lessons needed to focus on establishing a foundation of AI literacy across the organization, so it created a "Getting to Know Generative AI" course to enhance everyone's understanding of generative AI. The organization had to get everyone on the same page, but it had to be fun, and it had to be interesting, because this was going to be mandatory education for the entire workforce, Knuth said.

"To stay true to the guidelines we had laid out and our vision for this education, we created content that was compartmentalized," she explained. "If any of you are reformed coders in a past life, it's a similar concept to creating containers of code that can be assembled to create one or more programs.

"We created content components that were a subset of the whole, but we needed something to bring it together in a cohesive way – such as scaffolding to give it structure," she added. "We used Articulate Rise software to accomplish this. Our components included interactive elements, visuals, videos and text content to create flow, much of which was created with generative AI tools."

It was important to create compelling content that would hold attention for an increasingly distracted audience with a short attention span. The health system also was clear in explaining that OSF HealthCare has a commitment to innovation, so that requires continuous learning for all employees.

"The OSF vision is to harness the power of generative AI to advance the exploration, use and adoption to optimize healthcare delivery, empower healthcare professionals and improve patient experiences across our health system," Knuth stated.

After sharing the vision, she noted, key messages included:

• As you begin to use these tools, keep in mind they are not perfect – it's important to validate the results you receive back.
• These tools can provide false and misleading information and it takes the user to discern the value of the information they receive.
• If you are using these tools in the course of your work at OSF, never copy and paste patient protected information into a generative AI tool that has not been approved for that use.

MEETING THE CHALLENGE

OSF strategically rolled out education tailored to the individual needs of all 24,000 employees. One version was aimed at leaders and providers, and the organization created another version for all other roles.

"This allowed us to tailor messages and the level of education appropriately for both groups," Knuth explained. "We deployed our first round of mandatory education across the workforce in January/February 2024 along with a brief survey that allowed us to understand the impact the education had.

"We have a platform that was internally designed called Corporate University that housed the module which could be completed in about 15 minutes," she continued. "This is not connected to Epic but is available on the OSF website employee portal. All employees receive email notifications about the mandatory training and follow-up emails if it is not completed by the deadline."

The content includes brief quizzes to ensure comprehension.

RESULTS

78.75% of all OSF employees completed the mandatory education, 74% of those learners said it enhanced their knowledge of the subject matter, and 65% said the learning activity provided content that was relevant to their role, said Shana Freehill, DNP, RN, manager of education and professional development at OSF HealthCare.

"When you consider there are 24,000 employees, 78.75% completion is strong," she noted. "Seventy-four percent indicating the content enhanced their knowledge of subject matter and 65% believing the content was relevant to their role demonstrates the education was robust and well developed.

"It takes creativity to develop meaningful education for such a broad group of learners when we take into account clinical and non-clinical roles and the various work areas throughout the ministry," she added.

ADVICE FOR OTHERS

According to Harvard Business Review, ChatGPT is one of the most widely diffused and fastest-adopted products in history. Just two months after launch it had 100 million users. Instagram took two and a half years to acquire that many users. Facebook took four and a half years.

The faster technology spreads, the less time users have to learn from one another and mimic patterns of use, so it is important everyone knows expectations and guidelines and has a basic understanding, Knuth said.

"Also, realize you will have to do ongoing training because the most-advanced AI-based tools will change and there can be new features and new use cases, so just realize this will be something to review and prepare for by initiating new training as it becomes necessary," she advised.

"As we do with any education effort – understand your audience and where they are starting from on the subject matter," she continued. "Consider how people regularly seek and receive information today and try to understand why that works, why it is effective. Consider important takeaways when designing your education – both for approach and content."

Generative AI is a fun, interesting topic, she added.

"The educational approach and content should be innovative, different and feel new," she recommended. "Use generative AI tools to create content and make sure your learners understand what parts of the education module were created using generative AI tools – videos, visuals, key messages, etc. Transparency is an important hallmark of ethical use of generative AI so it should be included in your training content.

"At OSF HealthCare, we've also created a tool called Prompt Buddy – a free app that will also be available in Microsoft Teams, which most employees use daily," she concluded. "It is a way for us to crowdsource some of the best prompts that have been found to be helpful so employees can learn from each other what works. We will likely include how to best use and contribute to Prompt Buddy in a future training."

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