Learning management systems for independent pharmacy owners

Often called LMS for short, a learning management system is a software application that provides the framework which handles all aspects of the learning process – it’s where you host, deliver, and track your training content.

An LMS is designed to make life easier for those in charge of training and development, which is often the store owner/manager in the community pharmacy setting. The key features of an LMS can be found in its abbreviation:

L — Learning. An LMS allows you to create a single source of online courses and training materials. This acts as a database for unique knowledge of the key skills required to work within your pharmacy. These skills may be associated with:

• How your pharmacy operates
• How to provide certain services
• How to administer certain products that you stock.

M — Management. The management aspect of an LMS provides you with the functionality to manage courses and learners. An LMS is more than a heap of courses, it is a well-organised system which enables you to manage the employee training cycle. For example, new employees can be directed to training courses specific to onboarding, whereas a staff member which is experiencing low sales can be directed to more sales-oriented courses.  

S — System. The systemic component of an LMS automates the most boring and tedious work, such as grading, processing statistics, analytics, and preparing reports. Plus, you can train your employees without leaving the office, managing all the processes right from your work computer.

In other words, an LMS is like your own online university. The system allows you to store and create your own online courses, provides learners access to the content, and helps you evaluate the results.

Benefits of an LMS:

As with any new system, it’s important to discuss the benefits, and with learning management systems there are three core benefits which would help your pharmacy:

• Consistency of training: Training and course delivery via an LMS is consistent since it is centralised. It delivers a consistent training and learning quality to all employees by supplying a single source of content, course materials and instructions.
• Easily tracks learner progress and performance: Learning management systems allow the pharmacies to easily generate training reports on an overall user/student level basis. By utilising an LMS for eLearning courses and/or online training, trainers can easily track goal progress, knowledge gain, ROI and more.
• Meet regulatory compliance: Many industries may be required to train, assess, and report for compliance purposes. Pharmacy is no exception. An LMS can help you satisfy these legal and regulatory requirements.

LMS and Pharmacy

With record keeping being the number one unmet standard in pharmacy, many pharmacy businesses are looking to LMSs to help them record and maintain accurate training records.

However, some roadblocks often hinder the community pharmacy from adopting a learning management system to take care of their staff training requirements. These are:

• Cost & technical roadblocks: While still significantly cheaper than sending staff to in-person training events, an LMS tool can be expensive if you opt-in for commercial learning management systems. Conversely, there are free and open-source LMSs. However, these are often complicated to set up and require technical talent within your team to get it working properly.
• Data migration: If the pharmacy already has existing procedures for in-person training, it can be difficult to migrate the data to an online platform. For example, converting paper-based SOPs to digital eLearning courses.
• Staff Acceptance: The introduction of a new LMS into the workplace can bring staff adoption difficulties – mostly due to technical reasons, such as the staff member not knowing how to use the tool.

NIRAH’s pharmacy LMS

NIRAH is an all-in-one LMS designed by pharmacists, for pharmacy businesses. It combines the ease and functionality of commercial LMS systems and the affordability of free, open-source systems. NIRAH was built to cater for owners of small independent pharmacies and aims to provide the following solutions:

• FREE: Our LMS is free* AND it requires no technical knowledge to set up. We have done all the hard work and created a super user-friendly system that any pharmacy owner can use. *NIRAH is free for independent pharmacies registered in England & Wales.
• SUPPORT: Our friendly staff are ready to support you in migrating your training to NIRAH. We can turn PDFs into eLearning, or paper into digital. We are here to help make the transition as smooth as possible for your store.
• INCENTIVES: We reward everyone who learns on NIRAH using a points system. Each completed module will earn 10 or 20 reward points, which can be saved and redeemed. These incentives will help boost adoption by your team.

If you’re interested in learning more about how NIRAH can help your pharmacy stay on top of staff training, get in touch with us today at [email protected].