OSF HealthCare Requires genAI Training to Create an AI-Ready Workforce

OSF HealthCare, a 16-hospital health system based in Peoria, Illinois, has instituted mandatory education for all 24,000 employees. It has a deliberate strategy to ensure that everyone from the janitor to the CEO is aware of the power of generative AI.

THE PROBLEM

Adopting generative AI as quickly as possible is of paramount importance to OSF HealthCare. Like all nonprofits across the country, it’s operating on thin operating margins, with staffing shortages expected to persist for at least the next decade. What’s more, clinicians are still recovering from COVID-19 and facing burnout from increased administrative burdens.

“We need to seize 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 for transforming health care, but actually getting to that future state is a challenge. We need the power of the entire workforce on the same side of the cliff to reap the rewards.”

“While we understood that our generative AI education needed to be mandatory across our healthcare system, we also understood that people have shorter attention spans,” she continued. “Traditional educational modalities weren’t going to work for this. We have a diverse knowledge base in the workforce, and we needed to educate everyone from transporters to housekeepers to surgeons.”

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

“We knew that people in our workforce were using these tools personally and in the workplace,” she said. “We needed to make sure they understood the organizational rules of the road regarding the use of generative AI tools at OSF HealthCare. We wanted to educate them about the potential benefits and the potential pitfalls to avoid.”

“To address the challenge, we took lessons from social media about how to capture someone’s attention and hold on to these short bursts of time (1-2 minutes) to deliver our core messages,” she continued. “We used mixed media to keep the content interesting and we used generative AI tools to help with the creation of the content.”

PROPOSAL

OSF HealthCare knew that the first lessons had to focus on building a foundation of AI literacy across the organization, so it created a “Getting to Know Generative AI” course to increase 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 would be mandatory education for the entire workforce, Knuth said.

“In order to stay true to the guidelines that we had set out and our vision for this course, we created content that was compartmentalized,” she explained. “If any of you were reformed programmers in a previous life, it’s a similar concept to creating containers of code that can be put together to create one or more programs.

“We created content components that were a subset of the whole, but we needed something to tie it together in a cohesive way, like scaffolding to give it structure,” she added. “We used Articulate Rise software to achieve this. Our components included interactive elements, visuals, videos, and text content to create flow, much of which was created using generative AI tools.”

It was important to create engaging content that would hold the attention of an increasingly distracted audience with short attention spans. The health system was also clear in explaining that OSF HealthCare is committed to innovation, so that requires continuous learning for all employees.

“OSF’s vision is to harness the power of generative AI to accelerate discovery, use and adoption to optimize healthcare delivery, empower healthcare professionals and improve the patient experience across our entire healthcare system,” said Knuth.

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

• When you start using these tools, keep in mind that they are not perfect. It is important to validate the results you receive.
• These tools may provide incorrect or misleading information and it is up to the user to determine whether the information they receive is valuable.
• If you use these tools as part of your work at OSF, you should never copy and paste patient-protected information into a generative AI tool that has not been approved for that use.

TOOK UP THE CHALLENGE

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

“This allowed us to tailor messaging and education levels to both groups,” Knuth explains. “We implemented our first round of mandatory education on the work floor in January/February 2024, along with a short survey that gave us insight into the impact of the education.

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

The content includes short quizzes to ensure understanding.

RESULTS

According to Shana Freehill, DNP, RN, manager of education and professional development at OSF HealthCare, 78.75% of all OSF employees have completed the required training, 74% of students said it increased their knowledge of the field, and 65% said the learning activity provided content relevant to their role.

“Considering there are 24,000 employees, 78.75% completion is strong,” she noted. “Seventy-four percent said the content increased their knowledge of the subject matter and 65% believed the content was relevant to their role, demonstrating that the training was robust and well-developed.

“It takes creativity to develop meaningful education for such a broad group of learners, taking into account clinical and non-clinical roles and the different areas of work within the ministry,” she added.

ADVICE FOR OTHERS

According to Harvard Business Review, ChatGPT is one of the most widespread and fastest-adopted products in history. It reached 100 million users just two months after its launch. It took Instagram two and a half years to gain that many users. It took Facebook four and a half years.

As technology spreads faster, users have less time to learn from each other and mimic usage patterns. That’s why it’s important for everyone to understand expectations and guidelines and have a basic understanding, Knuth said.

“Also realize that you will need to be continually training, because the most advanced AI tools will change and there may be new features and use cases, so keep in mind that this is something you need to evaluate and prepare for by starting new training as needed,” she advises.

“As we do with any educational endeavor, understand your audience and where they’re entering the topic,” she continued. “Think about how people are regularly seeking and receiving information today and try to understand why that works, why it’s effective. Think about key takeaways as you design your education — both in terms of approach and content.”

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

“The educational approach and content should feel innovative, different and new,” she advised. “Use generative AI tools to create content and ensure your learners understand what parts of the educational module were created using generative AI tools – videos, visuals, key messages, etc. Transparency is a key feature of ethical use of generative AI, so it should be incorporated into 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 every day,” she concluded. “It’s a way for us to crowdsource some of the best prompts that have proven useful, so employees can learn from each other what works. We’ll likely include in a future training on how to best use and contribute to Prompt Buddy.”

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