When do HIFIS users need refresher training?

So you've got a plan to train your staff on how to use HIFIS. That's great!

But now you're coming across a trickier question: when do staff need to revisit their training? You want your plan to include a thoughtful approach to refresher training, but there simply isn't a standard for HIFIS training. Well, never fear, we're here to help!

The forgetting curve

In some industries, particularly when we're talking about health and safety, there's a very rigorous requirement that staff get re-certified periodically. This approach is based on a concept called the Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve, which states that an hour after you've been taught something new, you're likely to forget about 50% of it. After 24 hours, you only remember about 33%, and by a week later, you're down to about 25%.

This curve applies when students are not encouraged or required to engage with what they've learned after they have been taught it. So for example, imagine you attend an interesting lecture about birds in Central America. Then, in a year, you go on a vacation to Costa Rica and someone asks you to recall the names of the birds from the lecture ("hey, what's that green one over there called?"). You probably will remember less than 25% of the birds you learned about in the lecture, because it's been a whole year and you don't go birdwatching in Costa Rica every day.

In contrast, if you attended the lecture because you are about to go on a month-long volunteer program to Costa Rica where you'll be helping to identify and band endangered bird species, your retention a year later is going to be much higher, because you were applying what you learned repeatedly.

Or, if you attended the lecture because you love birds and know you are going to Costa Rica next year, and you want to be good at identifying birds while you are there, then you’re probably likely to do something to improve your retention. Like buy a pocket field guide to birds of Central America, or watch a replay of the lecture, or spend some time listening to bird calls. Once again, you’re engaging with the material after you were initially taught it, so your retention will be higher.

Students, therefore, will have much higher retention of material if they continue to engage with the material after they’ve been taught it the first time.

Are staff actually using HIFIS?

Let’s come back to HIFIS now. We always recommend just-in-time training prior to launch. This means that if your launch day is planned for Wednesday, the ideal time to do training would be the day before, Tuesday (if you can). As close to launch as possible is the best time for HIFIS training to ensure that people don’t forget too much before they’re able to login to HIFIS for the first time.

But for many communities, launch day is in the past, and so now you’re looking at plans to train staff on an ongoing basis: when there’s a new hire, for example.

In those cases, a staff receives training and can immediately begin using HIFIS on their first shift. There’s no gap between their training and their ability to login to HIFIS for the first time (theroetically; if it takes your community a while to set up HIFIS accounts that might be something you want to improve on), so their retention should be higher.

Right?

Well… that depends. Just because you have an expectation that staff are able to login to HIFIS… are they actually doing so? We’ve seen and heard some things that might shock you (or might not, who knows). Service providers where only one person actually uses HIFIS, and they’re responsible for making updates to everyone else’s clients. Service providers where they do data entry once a month. Service providers where HIFIS training was just “checking a box” that the funders were requiring them to check, but here’s what we really do.

And then of course there are staff that legitimately don’t need to access HIFIS regularly. Relief staff at a shelter, for example, might only cover a couple shifts each month. And executive directors and administrative assistants may only need HIFIS when it comes time for reporting.

Our suggestion: regularly monitor whether staff are logging into HIFIS or not. Have a policy that, if a user hasn’t logged in in the past, say, 30 days, their account gets deactivated. The next time they try to login, they will ask for their account to be reactivated, at which point you require them to do a refresher training.

Looking for a way to check if staff are acually logging into HIFIS?

Check out our Audit Boot Camp report: Stale User Accounts!

Are they following directions?

The first challenge to combat with refresher training is staff who forget how to use HIFIS because they don’t use HIFIS regularly. But even if staff do use HIFIS regularly, there’s a second challenge: are they following instructions?

For example, maybe your instructions are for staff to select “Coordinated Access + Explicit” consent any time a client signs the consent form, but sometimes staff select only the “Explicit” option because it’s the one that appears first in the drop-down menu.

Or maybe your instructions are for shelter staff to always record a Housing History record for the place a client stayed immediately prior to book-in, but your data shows that staff simply aren’t doing that step.

Or, could be that your instructions are for staff to record chronic illnesses as a Contributing Factor, but some staff are recording them as Health Issues.

Whenever you find that there are data entry errors that suggest staff are not following instructions, that is a signal that some staff need refresher training. However, these staff certainly know how to login and use HIFIS, they have just developed some bad habits. So their refresher training might be more tightly focused on fixing the bad habits.

If you can identify that the bad habits are isolated to a handful of users, teams, or service providers, then you can provide additional training just for them. If it’s more widespread, you could provide refresher training to all users. For example, you could require everyone to complete refresher training about the Consent types in HIFIS.

Our suggestion: regularly monitor the most important components of your system for data quality. If you find areas where the data quality is quite low, provide refresher training to address that specific issue.

Need to audit your system’s data quality?

Ask us about our Reviewing Services today!

What does refresher training look like?

The short answer is that refresher training can vary wildly, depending on its purpose.

Staff that login infrequently might forget the basics, like how to reset their password or how to add a client. Meanwhile, staff that do login daily but have developed bad habits might need reminders about which field to record some data point in.

Refresher training, therefore, is going to vary depending on your needs.

• You might require staff that haven’t logged in in a long time - like 6 months - to redo all of their training, same as a first-timer.

• For staff who login infrequently - such as relief staff - you could provide an abbreviated training that covers the key points. Potentially, you could make it mandatory for staff who, say, have logged in less than 3 times in the first 30 days after their training is completed.

• Staff who log in regularly but have bad habits should receive training that only covers the specific area where there is an issue.

Abbreviated, recap training

It might be more work than you’re willing to do, but it’s worth considering keeping a training option that’s brief (30 minutes or so) that covers all the key points. You can pull it out any time you need to for that second group - people that don’t log in that frequently - but there’s also another reason why it might be worth developing.

HIFIS is constantly being updated with bug fixes and new versions. Sometimes screens look different. Sometimes there’s a new field on an otherwise familiar screen. Sometimes things get re-labelled.

When you update your software to a new version, it’s basically a requirement that you communicate the changes users can expect to see. Which is… training? What if you take the opportunity to introduce the new changes and also introduce reminders about key elements of HIFIS that you don’t want people to forget?

For example, HIFIS version 4.0.60 included the VI-SPDAT version 3 series. Assuming you want to utilize that tool, you might be planning a communication that notifies users that they are supposed to start using the VI-SPDAT v3 instead of the v2. But instead, you could take the opportunity to build out this communication a bit more, and call it refresher training. Don’t just say the VI-SPDAT v3 is available - also remind staff that when they’re doing an intake for the By-Name List, it’s important to select “Coordinated Access + Explicit” consent so they appear on our prioritization list, and also to fill in the client’s Housing History so HIFIS can tell if they’re chronically homeless or not. You could record this all in a quick video, or assemble a short course in your LMS, offer a Zoom webinar, or put it together in a document. But rather than internally thinking about it like a communication, think about it as an opportunity to provide refresher training. Then you can tell all staff that, due to the recent software update, it’s mandatory to attend/complete/read the training. It’s likely that you’ll be doing this sort of HIFIS update once per year, so you can think about this like annual refresher training.

Issue-specific refresher training

Let’s imagine that you have a policy to monitor your data quality and identify an issue. Here’s a fun way you could address that.

Let’s imagine that you’ve identified that staff at shelters aren’t recording Housing History prior to intake. First, you set a goal to address it. You could say something like “during the month of February, that’s going to be our focus.” Then, record a quick video that highlights what you expect staff to be doing. It is also helpful to explain why certain elements are necessary - “we use Housing History prior to shelter to identify ways that we can reduce inflows to homelessness.” Next, you set a goal: “this month, we’re setting a goal that for 100% of shelter intakes, there will be a Housing History record for the previous night,” and issue a challenge to staff: “the team that has the highest completion will get a pizza lunch in the first week of March.” You can keep a leaderboard and show each team’s current stats, or send out weekly updates indicating who is in the lead.

This way, you’re encouraging everyone to improve their data entry in a very specific way during a period of time. However, since you’re asking them to do something repeatedly (for every shelter intake), then the repetition should help staff to remember to keep doing it that way even after the challenge is over.

Conclusion

There’s no magic one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to refresher training, but I hope that this discussion has given you some ideas and things to think about.

How do you handle refresher training in your community?