Improving Pharmaceutical Compliance Training with AI-based Adaptive Learning

Our clients often come to us because their existing training program is wasteful and time-consuming. They need it for compliance purposes, yet it often fails to achieve measurable goals.

One of our clients, a pharmaceutical company, was in this exact position. Their outdated system lacked the benefits of modern adaptive learning. Fortunately, we were able to use Realizeit in addition to their existing content to produce a better system that performed measurably improved results, 40% faster.

The key to this approach was applying AI to a bite-sized, adaptive learning context.

Adaptive Learning through AI

Compared to traditional compliance training, adaptive and personalized learning provides many benefits. It saves time, improves learner engagement, and has a direct impact on performance and outcomes.

Traditional learning tends to be a one-size-fits-all program. There is no knowledge history for each learner, and the system simply “checks the box” after completion. There is therefore no direct connection to business outcomes.

Adaptive learning, by contrast, is personalized based on prior knowledge. It teaches exactly what each learner needs at any particular moment, reinforcing job readiness. This removes redundancy and creates measurable results.

The technology that adaptive learning relies on is AI and machine learning. It would be nearly impossible to keep track of every learner’s knowledge history by hand while delivering personalized course content in a timely manner. Instead, AI can keep track of all of this information while constructing a learning journey tailored to each learner.

The key to AI-powered adaptivity is bite-sized learning. Large, monolithic course contents are built with a one-size-fits-all mindset, without considering each learner’s individual knowledge history. With bite-sized pieces, on the other hand, AI can mix and match relevant content by carefully selecting them one at a time to build a cohesive whole.

Case Study: Compliance in the Pharmaceutical Industry

Our client was trying to go from their traditional way of learning to a more modern approach. They had consolidated down from other learning programs and were focused on having the best Learning Management System (LMS) and Learning Experience Platform (LXP).

But there was still a need for more intelligence. These programs, on their own, could not really gage what learners already knew. So our client wanted to bring in adaptive learning for compliance training, among other things.

Problems with Traditional Compliance Training for Pharma

Before taking on adaptive learning, the standard compliance training program was both overly complicated and inefficient. Compliance is highly important for the pharmaceutical industry- there is a learning standard for all operating procedures. However, existing techniques provided little ability to measure success.

Compliance training was originally all document-based. Whenever a new change in procedure was made, learners were given lengthy documents to read, often hundreds of pages long. They were asked to simply read and sign off that they knew the procedures, without any further testing. There was almost no visibility into competency and the risks that the company was under.

Moreover, this process was incredibly repetitive and wasteful. People were reading the same requirements year after year as part of their job duties. Many learners felt like they already knew the material, yet at the same time, had to make sense of constant change.

There were lots of changes to these pharmaceutical procedures on a regular basis. The existing learning system was inefficient, in that learners didn’t know what the changes were when they were made. The impact of adaptive learning, then, came much from saving time by detecting prior knowledge.

Realizeit was able to give people credit for what they already knew, while also understanding the gaps.

How Adaptive Learning Improved Compliance Training

It was fortunate that our client already had a good LMS and LXP. Realizeit effectively works with these systems, and while it could replace them, in this case—it seamlessly integrated with the existing learning platforms.

One thing that adaptive learning did for our client was to reduce redundancy by finding and mapping each learner’s prior knowledge.

At the start of one course, for example, the program carries out what we call a determined knowledge check. This check combines test questions with user feedback about their own knowledge to get a sense of where their knowledge about a certain topic applies. From this information, the AI is able to plan which of the 30 bite-sized course pieces the learner should be given next.

Outcomes of Implementing Realizeit

After implementing our platform, our client was able to rapidly determine whether or not someone actually did know the correct standard for a particular procedure. Moreover, they could see this on a global or regional basis, and discover where some things weren’t working as well as they could.

Our client discovered, for example, that learners in the UK and India were having a particularly hard time with one piece of knowledge. They were able to restructure the content around that piece of knowledge and quickly solve the problem. This was possible because of the bite-sized approach we take, which breaks learning down into small, independent chunks.

Ultimately, our client achieved a much higher speed to competency. Learning took place 40% faster than before, and there was an estimated 11,000 hours saved for one course alone.

Conclusion: Modernizing Compliance Training with Realizeit

The Realizeit platform provides an AI-based adaptive learning solution for a variety of situations, including onboarding, upskilling, and compliance training.

When it comes to compliance training, like with our pharmaceutical client, many companies find themselves stuck in a rut. Their existing systems are inefficient and don’t produce measurable outcomes. This is especially problematic for compliance, as it is necessary to determine that a learner is job-ready to a high degree of certainty.

Adaptive systems like Realizeit are the key to reducing redundancy and to providing the measurable results that compliance training needs. Our system maintains a real-time understanding of each learner’s knowledge history, so as to determine what they know, and what they need to study.

Our mission is to transform workforce training and learning through AI-driven personalization. If you would like to start a conversation, learn more about us, or hear about how other organizations use Realizeit's adaptive learning program, feel free to reach out and connect with a team who is eager to solve your challenges. 

We hope to help you make personalized learning a key component of your organization’s training strategy!