This year, the OPEN Health team attended the annual Life sciences Trainers and Educators Network (LTEN) conference in San Antonio, Texas. The network’s ambition is to build a community centered around a culture of continuous learning, and the compelling and dynamic agenda from this year’s conference brought together a wealth of expertise from a variety of areas within life science training. The sessions were a mixture of industry leading keynote speakers, Learning Labs, workshops and plenary sessions, all of which facilitated productive peer-to-peer discussions, questions and wider thinking in a format that truly embraced learning theory.

On day one, our team, including Jessica Ingram, Executive Vice President and Global Client Partner, Mark Bernauer, Associate Director and Rosemary Jose Haaksman, Senior Director, led a workshop session titled “Value Communication and Training Solutions to Deliver Strategic Market Access”. The workshop focused on the importance of optimizing Market Access cross-functionally to improve understanding around the complexities of market access and real-world evidence. It also explored how overcoming the hurdles of optimizing the delivery of a compelling payer evidence package can lead to optimal reimbursement.

Our team were also excited to host a Learning Lab session titled “Do we need an L&D Approach to Omnichannel, or an Omnichannel Approach to L&D”. The Learning Lab was led by Rosie Humphreys, Director, Technology Solutions and Jessica Ingram who delivered an interactive session exploring the transformative effect of omnichannel strategies on the delivery of information to customers and patients, and the importance of the L&D function in supporting teams to embrace this shift. It also highlighted the opportunities that omnichannel presents for the delivery of truly personalized training programs. In a world where we’ve come to expect personalization in our day-to-day experiences (Netflix, Amazon etc.), shouldn’t learners be offered the same experience in order to truly meet their learning needs?

Equally, within the pharmaceutical industry, where the traditional model relied on sales representatives and MSLs as the only channel, can’t we empower pharma employees to drive more customer-centric approaches, by training them to be the leading channel within an effective omnichannel ecosystem?

The audience discussion reflected, that whilst the industry continues to waiver around the definition of omnichannel and how to implement it, when you break omnichannel down into some core guiding principles, maybe it’s not so far from “putting the learner at the heart” after all.

With such a diverse conference agenda, we were pleased to be able to attend expert led sessions, in particular “Hack the Brain: Crash Course on Learning Theory”, led by Caitlin Locke, Gilead. The session introduced three main schemata of learning theories: behaviorism, constructivism and cognitivism. Locke provided an interesting perspective to understanding cognitivism and constructivism through cognitive load theory and spiral curriculum scaffolding.

This session provided an opportunity for attendees to work together in pairs to apply these theories to not only solve their own examples of learning problems at work, but also work in their teams to solve complex challenges experienced by different organizations outside of what they may have experienced first-hand.

The variety and dynamic nature of the LTEN conference agenda once again re-asserted the need for continuous learning, but also highlighted the nuance and complexity in the challenges that the audience face. It is exciting to be able to share and learn from thought leaders and industry experts in this space and we would like to thank the LTEN team for another fantastic conference.