From vendor dependency to in-house excellence. How root-cause analysis leads to targeted training that improves performance in high-stakes environments.
Before I joined the team, Global Medical Response was outsourcing eLearning development to a third-party vendor at $15,000 per course, plus $1,500 to $3,000 for every change or update, with a 2 to 3 week turnaround time for even minor edits. The results did not justify the investment.
Over three years, the organization had accumulated a compliance training library that lacked instructional design foundations, failed to meet regulatory standards, and frustrated the very employees required to complete it.
Compliance and OSHA training is mandatory for all employees at Global Medical Response, with a hard completion deadline every September. But the existing course library was working against that goal. Courses were bloated, repetitive, not optimized for mobile access, and especially burdensome for experienced field-based staff who were forced to sit through content they already knew cold.
The result was predictable: low engagement, last-minute completions, and a surge of LMS support tickets every August as thousands of employees scrambled to finish before the deadline.
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I started with a thorough review of the existing course library. My findings were consistent across almost every course: learning objectives were misaligned with regulatory requirements, and content was redundant and inflated.
The current learning objectives did not reflect what employees actually needed to know and do, so I collaborated with SMEs to fix this before designing and rebuilding using human-centered design principles.
Seasoned professionals were being required to complete a 90-minute HIPAA course covering material they had already mastered. This addition to the HIPAA training program would:
Throughout the project, I used Microsoft Project to manage timelines, track dependencies, and maintain stakeholder visibility across 20+ concurrent course redesigns. I partnered cross-functionally with subject matter experts across IT, Governance, Risk and Compliance, and clinical operations to ensure every course met both regulatory standards and real-world learner needs.
I redesigned the full compliance training library in-house using Articulate Rise for mobile-first delivery and Articulate Storyline 360 for interactive and scenario-based elements. Key design decisions included:
I owned the full lifecycle from needs assessment through final deployment. The impact was measurable, financial, and organizational.
Employees began completing required training earlier in the cycle, reducing the August surge of last-minute completions and LMS support requests. In-house development also gave the L&D team full agility to make updates without waiting weeks for a vendor to respond.
The Director of Governance, Risk, and Compliance recognized the redesigned IT compliance training as far superior to anything the organization had previously produced, and praised the team for eliminating costly vendor dependency.