Rapid Development and Deployment of a Learning Management System to Train an Interprofessional Team to Manage Surgery for a COVID-19–Positive Patient

BACKGROUND: When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, surgical services had to design and implement a new system to safely manage patients and prevent workforce exposure. METHODS: A team of clinicians and educators rapidly reengineered the surgical care process. An online learning management system (LMS) and authoring tool that supported iterative remote asynchronous communication was used to build a learning module employed to train an interprofessional team to the new care process. RESULTS: Care process redesign was accomplished in a concentrated effort involving clinicians and educators. Patient flow and the role of each team member at every phase of care was presented in the LMS. The LMS was refined by input from team members provided through the authoring tool directly to the educator on the screens where the edit was applicable. The LMS was deployed after four days to more than 100 surgical team members who managed their first COVID-19 patient two days later. The number of COVID-19 patients managed was limited, but there were no untoward patient events and no staff exposure. CONCLUSION: Care process reengineering and deployment efforts are accelerated by early involvement of educators and use of an LMS with an authoring tool that supports rapid module build and refinement in a socially distant workplace. The LMS enables access on any online platform at a time convenient to team members who can then learn at their own pace. This reengineering and LMS development approach can be generally applied to speed many care process modification and improvement efforts.