Suicide Assessment and Precautions Policy Rollout

This is a rollout I recently completed for a new suicide prevention policy in a large healthcare system. For this project, I worked together with a diverse cross-functional team of SMEs and stakeholders (doctors, nurses, clinical directors, behavioral health experts) from across the system and delivered a comprehensive solution in under 10 weeks.

Tools used:

Articulate Rise, Storyline 360, Adobe InDesign, Adobe XD, Vyond, Premier Pro, Audacity

Details

As learning designers, our work has (or should have) a profound impact on the performance of our learners. In this policy rollout that quite literally deals with directly preventing a death, the stakes were raised. Although I already go about my work with a strong sense of moral responsibility to my learners, I knew this project would magnify that - if I didn’t do this right, lives were at stake.

Since we needed to introduce a new policy to a part of the system containing several thousand employees, I decided I first needed to understand exactly who these people were, how they were situated in the system, what their days looked like, and how to best structure this experience for them. As you might expect, there was a huge amount of variation. In the end, I was able to divide them into two main groups based on what they were going to need to do with the policy: providers and officer managers, and other clinical staff. In the end, I created separate modules, scenarios, and curricula for these groups. At the same time, I worked with stakeholders and experts across the system to help determine what successful implementation of these policies would look in terms of KPIs and to set Kirkpatrick-related evaluation intervals. I wanted to make sure that we not only collected data beyond the initial learner survey, but also that the data we collected was actionable.

Being the only learning designer on the project presented a challenge, as did the tight timeline. I had to quickly familiarize myself with a difficult, specialized subject and come up with inventive ways to design and develop an effective learning experience with very limited resources. In this process, I reached for tools (like Storyline and Vyond) that I knew would allow me to quickly develop explainer videos and authentic scenario experiences with real consequences for learners. Following Cathy Moore’s brilliant action mapping approach, I quickly isolated the actions that each group of learners would need to be able to complete for the policy to be successfully implemented. Once that was complete, I wrote - and together with some intrepid recruits - recorded the audio scripts for the explainer videos and the scenarios, which I later edited in Audacity.

After development, I began A/B user testing the modules in diverse virtual focus groups through Teams, where I timed and observed them. I also asked them to keep diaries of their experiences, which were particularly helpful, as users’ comments spurred a number of changes to the modules after testing. Based on these comments, I also rethought how I wanted to build and deploy the curricula in our LMS.

In the end, I designed and developed three Rise modules containing explainer videos created in Vyond, numerous branching scenarios created with Vyond and Storyline 360, and two job aids (a flowchart and an infographic) with Adobe XD and Adobe InDesign. You can see examples of these below.

Initial surveys (collected through Survey Monkey) show that learners appreciate the realistic and tailored nature of the scenarios and interactions, as well as the ability to complete modules on the go with Rise’s responsive design features. Further evaluation of the first KPI benchmarks has not yet been conducted, but is expected soon.

Rise Modules

Explainer Videos

Branching Scenarios

Job Aid Flowchart

Job Aid Infographic