Challenge

After receiving exceptional praise for the Inspire Health Breastfeeding eLearning platform, The Bower Foundation decided to work with DDA again to produce another interactive video-based eLearning platform. Like the previous eLearning module, the new platform would be available to both medical students and professionals in the state of Mississippi, based upon affiliation with one of the many Mississippi colleges and universities with which The Bower Foundation works. The Bower Foundation learned that many medical students go through their entire medical education without any exposure to information about health insurance in the U.S. and how it works. Seeing an opportunity to better prepare medical students and professionals for one of the key challenges of their career, Inspire Health chose to focus the new eLearning module on teaching learners about how health insurance came to be structured as it is in the United States, how that impacts care, and how this affects both patients and health care providers.

Objectives

The new Health Insurance eLearning platform would leverage the structure of the previous Breastfeeding platform, helping to improve design and development efficiency and reduce the timeline for project completion. This course would be substantially shorter, an hour in length, so the structure was modified to match this shorter content. The course is divided into three cases, and there is only one pretest and posttest for the course overall. While the basic design layout was maintained, a new design skin branded specifically for this course was developed to help distinguish the new eLearning module.

Solution

DDA ported over all the rich functionality of the previous Breastfeeding eLearning platform, including access based upon users' school email addresses or through their own LMS accounts, segmented video-based eLearning, action stops, pretests and posttests, certification, and robust metrics reporting. The content for this eLearning platform is centered on animated slides that glide from one segment to the next with animated visual cues to keep attention. Interspersed throughout this core content are a series of roleplaying videos that portray true-to-life stories of Mississippians who are struggling to get health or dental care without insurance, or who struggle to pay for it even when they do. These stories were based on the real stories The Bower Foundation's contacts in the Jackson Free Clinic, one of the largest providers of free medical and dental care in the state.

Users access the module either through a LMS offered through Mississippi colleges and universities, or by registering on the platform directly with a school email address affiliated with one of those qualified Mississippi colleges and universities. The Bower Foundation manages access for specific Mississippi schools through the administrative area, where they can assign a school administrator for each school (giving them the capacity to see metrics on only their students), educational programs offered at the school, and the qualifying email domains that students must use to access the platform through direct registration. Metrics reports provide global and individual performance metrics that reveal the growth in knowledge on health insurance in the U.S. among those that take the course, along with their evaluation of the eLearning experience, granular metrics on each user's answer to each question, and a global summary of all responses to each question to reveal common strengths and weaknesses on topics across all learners.