Blended Learning in Healthcare
No economic sector in Germany is facing a similarly rapid change and such a far-reaching foreign regulation of the monetary resources by the legislative like the health service.
The change of the account system of the hospital and nursing charges to the DRG system since 2004 led to an increased competition increases in the hospital sector. Increasingly private clinic operators buy public hospitals that have a lack of capital equipment and conquer shares of the market.
Also in the area of the doctors there is a similar dramatic drop in prices to which combined with the rising health costs and the enlarged demands in quality. Also the high claim to the education and continuing education of the medical occupations close to medicine, innovative organisation forms and ways of an actual and efficient education continuously moved in the foreground through the introduction of the uniform standard of assessment (EBM).
Blended Learning as a combination of traditional learning and modern e-learning to elements reduces the demands in respect to learning offers with a defined learning location and learning time (in agreed time clusters). Theoretically, learning units can be delivered in chronologically individually divideable learning phases independent of place.
Repeatability of contents and availability of learning materials offer a more sustainable organisation of knowledge.
In addition, cost saving effects can be achieved by the adaptable learning surroundings and the multiplications of learning contents in time (e.g., absence of the workplace) and money (e.g., travel expenses, accommodation costs).
These qualities make Blended Learning more and more interesting for the strictly budgeted health service, even if personnel and the technical conditions often yet do not correspond to the special requirements of this learning system.
Basic for the introduction and the successful application of Blended Learning is therefore the creation of the technical conditions as well as the improvement of respective competences of the persons operating in the health service in the experienced contact with the new, IT-supported learning instruments. These are the biggest obstacles for a large scale introduction and application of Blended Learning in the healthcare sector.
As a result of the central position of information technology in the working processes already today the stakeholders form the healthcare sector cannot resist to integrate Blended Learning in their institutions. Blended learning will be supporting their development in direction of applied knowledge management. It will open the chance of an improvement of the education quality while reducing costs which is matching with the demands and the expectations of the healthcare institutions.
This is a german language essay about this topic: Blended Learning im Gesundheitswesen