Absorb LMS vs. HealthStream Learning Management System

Absorb LMS answered a lot of questions we were facing as an organization in how we train and develop our employees. Absorb LMS is not only a fantastic repository for learning resources, the built in tools make creating new resources and experiences for our teammates so much easier and more streamlined. We use the Absorb Create authoring tool and have had great luck in course creation using many methods (AI, templates, etc.). We implemented the LMS in 4 weeks due to the guidance and willingness of our Implementation manager to move along at a quicker pace. We also love the Absorb library of content that helps fill in some of the soft skills and safety gaps without us having to create internal resources.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• Customer Service - Our CSM, Kirsten Spak, provides friendly, timely and high quality help and has helps us to understand and efficiently use the system.
• Course Creation - We have been able to create custom courses with a wide range of features, including branding, audio, video and assessments.
• Reporting - Absorb LMS offers a robust reporting function which allows us to understand our users and meet the needs of our partners when user information is required for their projects.

Incentivized

• Meeting healthcare regulatory education needs - comes with a regulatory library focused on those needs (The Joint Commission and OSHA)
• Elective Course Options - dozens of course libaries available for purchase to meeting contining education needs of nurses and clinical employees
• Class Registraion - Does a really nice job of handling thousands of class registrations for massive education roll outs
• Course Building - with additional resources you can purchase rights to author your own courses.

• 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

Incentivized

• From an administrative point of a view they use an "and" relationship in their database and they need to move to and and/or relationship. So a nurse can work in the ED and hold a second job in the medical/peds. Right now HealthStream doesn't find that nurse and it takes a lot of work to find that 2nd job code on the administrative side. HealthStream should be able to pick that up.
• It is lacking a 2nd supervisor field to pick up the 2nd job codes that are created which links up to issue number one. Once you find the 2nd job code you can't link it to 2nd supervisor.
• The HLC/competency center needs alot more programming work. It's a newer program for HealthStream and missing alot needed requests. It needs checklist functionality or some special editable fields and an ability to change rater on the assignments to help the educators.

Incentivized

Absorb provides the platform and support for us to create a place for resources that is agile and simple to deploy. We are able to use across multiple countries and departments. Absorb is also constantly developing their platform to meet users needs, which is helpful for us as we grow.

I would most definitely choose to renew our contract as HealthStream is a great tool that meets the needs of the organization when it comes to delivering and tracking training. Prior to rolling out HealthStream, most of the tracking would be done manually through Excel, and classes would all have to be done in person. HealthStream really optimizes everyone's time, and makes everything more efficient.

It is very intuitive, not just from an admin perspective to manage courses and track completions, but also from a learners' perspective. It is very easy to find courses, search for courses, and track personal course progress. The interface is well designed, which makes it simpler for our audience to navigate the portal and find what they are looking for

Incentivized

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

Absorb LMS's performance is very reliable and consistent. Pages load quickly. Report are generated within a reasonable amount of time (even with significant amounts of data), etc. Nothing seems to slow it down.

[...] is a ROCK star- having her as part of our support team has been a game changer. She is a true problem solver at heart and has an unique ability to retain who we are as a company and match that with what can help us most. She has been a game changer for our internal admin team and is supporting us through a business review to help guide us in the best direction on our constant growth.

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.

Incentivized

Absorb was able to provide an initial training of the platform, covering all our basic needs. Additionally, there are Absorb learning modules available for further learning that can be accessed at anytime. There is also the ability to review Absorb's extensive resource library to find the answers to questions/troubleshooting. Beyond that, we opted for the Premier Support so our organization has access to a dedicated Customer Success Manager.

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.

In the past, I've used both BlackBoard and IntraLearn to manage health care eLearning. Intralearn, in particular, is a great in-house solution - although it does require full customization by the administrator as there is no canned content or content library resource. IntraLearn is integrated with Sharepoint, so that is a plus for any organization where Sharepoint is used for their web presence.

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.

• Our ROI is yet to be determined as we haven't fully rolled it out yet. We hope that this will improve our customer loyalty and advocacy, set us apart from competitors, and appeal to prospects as something that is extremely valuable. ROI measurements will include customer participation, satisfaction from learners and their managers and any new customers who quote the platform as a reason they chose us.

Incentivized

• More efficiency. Easy way to implement training to a larger group of people.
• Helps to orientate new hires to our organization quicker.
• Consistency with training messages. We can communicate a method that can be easily adopted and implement across the organization.