Jesse Corn, CPO Zivian Health, is a digital health executive and health tech founder with over 14 years of experience in digital solutions.
The healthcare industry is at a turning point. Even as innovation accelerates across diagnostics, therapeutics and digital infrastructure, our ability to adequately train and support the workforce delivering care becomes increasingly strained. Faced with regulatory complexity, staffing shortages and a growing number of mobile, non-physician providers, healthcare organizations must confront a critical question: Are we truly preparing our clinicians to succeed?
Nowhere is this more evident than among advanced practice providers (APPs)—nurse practitioners and physician assistants—who now form one of the fastest-growing sectors in healthcare delivery. APPs are uniquely positioned to bridge critical gaps in care access, but their paths into clinical practice remain highly variable.
Non-physician educational experiences differ widely by program, geography and clinical focus, leading to a workforce rich in potential but fragmented in preparation. This variability demands a quick response—one that recognizes not just the quantity of APPs entering the workforce but the quality of training and support we provide them.
To meet the needs of a modern, mobile and increasingly APP-driven workforce, healthcare leaders must reimagine workforce development through dynamic, clinically relevant educational experiences.
A Workforce Gap We Can’t Ignore
Our healthcare workforce challenges are well documented: an aging population, rising burnout and an exodus of clinicians from bedside roles. But equally concerning is a subtler issue—the mismatch between non-physician training and what today’s healthcare environment demands.
This disconnect is particularly pronounced for advanced practice providers (APPs), who are entering an increasingly complex care landscape shaped by multistate telehealth expansion, evolving scope-of-practice laws, and rapid technological innovation. As APPs graduate in growing numbers, many begin their careers with a wide variation in clinical preparation and gaps in hands-on training.
For example, according to a recent Bloomberg article on the clinical preparedness of nurse practitioners, nurse practitioner students “must obtain 500 clinical hours to graduate,” which is “less than 5% of the amount required of medical doctors before they can practice medicine.”
This highlights a systemic challenge rooted in the patchwork nature of advanced practice education and the inadequate infrastructure for post-graduate support.
Where LMS Platforms Are Heading
Traditionally, many healthcare learning management systems have been compliance-focused tools to check boxes for mandatory training. Recent research underscores the value of improving how we educate our healthcare workforce.
A 2021 scoping review published in Academic Medicine examined over a decade of continuing professional development (CPD) research and found that while CPD can positively influence clinician behavior and even patient outcomes, the structure and delivery of educational intervention play an important role in its effectiveness. Notably, multicomponent approaches that integrate both formal and informal learning, especially when combined with emerging technologies like e-learning, were found to be more impactful.
The review also highlighted gaps in training quality and consistency across health professions, reinforcing the need for systems that can adapt to individual learning needs and practice contexts.
Modern LMS platforms should serve as data-driven engines that close readiness gaps, standardize onboarding, provide just-in-time support and orient providers and efforts around quality of patient care. To support high-quality care, your learning system should:
• Deliver differentiated onboarding based on provider background, specialty and setting.
• Embed regulatory context tied to licensure, scope and state-specific collaboration requirements.
• Offer adaptive clinical refreshers that reinforce key decision making skills.
• Track progress and performance through gamification, engagement analytics and knowledge assessments.
Avoid platforms that assume a one-size-fits-all model. Instead, choose solutions that adapt to the individual clinician’s journey—offering modular content that fills gaps precisely when and where needed.
Delivering content in ways that feel rewarding and emotionally resonant—short videos, decision trees, real-world simulations—encourages clinicians to take ownership of their learning. Prioritizing engagement-driven design is especially critical when addressing educational variability, as it enables high-impact learning regardless of where a clinician begins.
Learning Systems As A Workforce Activation Tool
For healthcare leaders, investing in a modern learning system is both an educational and a workforce activation strategy that can expedite the time-to-productivity for new hires, improve the standardization of care and reduce burnout. Most importantly, better educational tooling can unlock potential, activating a high-growth, high-impact segment of the workforce that can help transform access, equity and efficiency across healthcare systems.
The Urgency And The Opportunity
As the healthcare system braces for continued workforce shortages and as care delivery increasingly depends on the strength of non-physician providers, the time for a new learning paradigm is now. We cannot afford to leave clinical quality to chance or treat education as an afterthought.
The future of healthcare workforce development won’t be one-size-fits-all. It will be smart, flexible and clinically tuned to the realities of the people doing the work. Now is the time to move beyond static training models and embrace learning systems that are agile, data-driven and aligned with your clinical and regulatory realities.
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