BioSoteria

Profile
BioSoteria is a drug safety consulting and training company that provides high quality, innovative drug safety consultant services and educational programs to the biopharmaceutical and healthcare community.

BioSoteria offers a wide range of drug safety and pharmacovigilance consultative services throughout the product lifecycle, including premarketing safety surveillance, postmarketing pharmacovigilance, and therapeutic risk management.

Challenge
Dr. Sally Van Doren, the CEO and founder of BioSoteria, recognized through her years of biopharmaceutical experience that there was a lack of convenient, comprehensive training on drug safety and pharmacovigilance.

There are limited options for individuals that want to study drug safety. Many drug safety experts either learned on the job or started off in the medical field and fell into the position by chance. To date, there are no colleges or universities that offer a drug safety degree or full suite of courses.

Dr. Van Doren founded BioSoteria in 2007, and quickly wanted to develop online courses for the biopharmaceutical and healthcare community in the content areas of pharmacovigilance and drug safety.  To begin the eLearning process, Dr. Van Doran hired Michele Flewell, VP, eLearning & Informatics.

Flewell used eLearning in past positions, but was primarily familiar with outsourcing the eLearning production/programming to expensive vendors.  “I would have a course storyboard ready for the hired programmer, but somehow, my vision would always get lost in translation and I would end up with a course I did not like and that I could not alter,” said Flewell. “Without the ability to update or alter courses, we would have to go back to the programmer and have them make the changes for us, which was time consuming and expensive.”

Because the pharmacovigilance field is always changing, Flewell knew BioSoteria needed their own authoring tool so that their eLearning team could update and change their eLearning courses and content without having to rely on expensive outsourced programmers.

Solution
With the help from Flewell, BioSoteria began their search for the perfect eLearning authoring tool.  Flewell went through many demos of different authoring tools and reviewed a well-known market research report before she finally chose Trivantis’ Lectora. “I liked Lectora for its ease-of-use and its robust features.  I love how I can update any of the courses or content within minutes without having to call a HTML expert or a programmer,” Flewell said.

BioSoteria’s eLearning team also loves the fact that they can integrate just about any type of file into Lectora. They incorporate flash, illustrations, audio, and animations into courses to add interactivity and engage learners. They even record their own audio in a studio and bring it into Lectora. “Lectora acts as a ‘spine’ to pull together many different engaging elements,” said Flewell.

BioSoteria also uses Lectora Integrator, which enables them to convert Microsoft PowerPoint slides into Lectora. “Our Subject Matter Experts use PowerPoint to add in all of their content and we easily convert the slides into Lectora.  This makes our content development and storyboard process effortless,” said Flewell.

To speed up the course creation process, Flewell relied on Trivantis’ Custom Development Services department (CDS) to create a graphic user interface that was branded specifically for BioSoteria. Because the GUI was developed within Lectora, everything was easy to update by BioSoteria if they chose to do so.

Dr. Van Doren’s dream of drug safety courses was finally coming true. With the ability to create eLearning in-house, BioSoteria’s courses were being created quickly and efficiently with minimal programming costs, which allowed them to allocate precious resources to technical content experts, instructional system designers, and media assets.  Now all BioSoteria needed was a Learning Management System (LMS) that could host the courses for the public to access.

Since Flewell was now familiar with Lectora, she decided to go with Trivantis’ CourseMill LMS.  According to Flewell, “I chose CourseMill for its low cost and its scalability.  It is a LMS that will grow with us as a company and that I can rely on.”

Results
By using Lectora at BioSoteria, creating online courses became easier and faster, Flewell shares. “Lectora empowers us because we now all have the ability to go into Lectora and make any changes that may come along due to regulatory requirements—a must in regulated industry training.”

“Our courses were built from scratch with limited resources and funds - Lectora and CourseMill made it all possible,” added Flewell.

Since January 2009, with the use of Lectora and CourseMill, BioSoteria was able to launch two engaging courses, containing Flash, audio, graphics, and interactive application exercises.  BioSoteria is expecting to roll out their newest course this June.  Twelve courses in a comprehensive curriculum called eLadder Safety are planned—all developed in Lectora and offered via CourseMill.

BioSoteria is currently using Lectora and CourseMill together in three different ways.

• If a company currently has their own LMS, they can purchase the drug safety courses and publish them to their LMS.
• If a company does not have an accessible LMS, they can purchase the courses and have them hosted by BioSoteria on CourseMill, providing the customer with an online training solution that is easily accessed via the Internet.
• Those looking to go into the drug safety field can purchase any of BioSoteria’s courses on their website and access them via CourseMill.

Not only does BioSoteria save money with Lectora, but so do their clients. According to Flewell, “We customize assessments to fit each of our customer’s requirements. This is easy and painless with Lectora because we can easily turn certain functionality on or off at little to no cost to the client.  Previously, we would have had to pay a programmer to modify the course which would have cost our client more money.  Without Lectora, not only would we be spending more money, but so would our clients.”

Moving forward, BioSoteria would like to use CourseMill to offer courses that will provide learners with a certificate of completion and Continuing Education Credits (CEU).  CourseMill has many ecommerce and scalable features that will allow BioSoteria to grow and strengthen as it provides eLearning drug safety courses to more and more of the healthcare community.