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Wild Iris Medical Education, Inc. |
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June 15, 2015 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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High-Quality Online Courses for Healthcare Professionals |
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RN CEO
Wild Iris Medical Education, Inc.
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – June 15, 2015
CEOCFO: Ms. Johnson, what is the idea behind Wild Iris? Ms. Johnson: Licensed healthcare professionals everywhere are required to take continuing education in order to maintain their licenses. Typically, they have gone to conferences, attended workshops, or received “in-service” training at work. But those options all take a lot of time and money. As an alternative, Wild Iris Medical Education offers high-quality online courses where certain professionals—mostly nurses, but also physical and occupational therapists, EMTs, and case managers—can educate themselves through self-study on their own time and at their own pace. A job in healthcare is stressful enough without the hassles that can be involved in maintaining one’s professional license, so we provide an easy way for them to meet their continuing education needs.
CEOCFO: Is it fairly common to do this online, or is it still not quite in the mainstream for nursing? Ms. Johnson: Online continuing education for nurses was certainly not common back when we got started back in 1998. We are one of the pioneers. Since then, it’s become more and more popular, especially lately, with everyone getting online with their mobile devices.
CEOCFO: What is the competitive landscape? Ms. Johnson: Our biggest competitors seem to be publishers, such as nursing journals. Their courses come mostly from articles that they turn into continuing education courses. It is a secondary revenue stream for them. We are somewhat unique, in that online continuing education is all we do and that our courses are developed especially for this purpose. There are also some small, independent companies out there similar to Wild Iris, but we have been in business longer than anyone else and our customers consider our courses to be of particularly high quality.
CEOCFO: Why take a course with Wild Iris? Ms. Johnson: There are a number of particular advantages to taking our courses. First, in a day and age when everybody is very busy, nurses can go to our website to take a course any time of day according to their own schedules. Not everyone has time—or money!—to attend a conference or take off time from work or family responsibilities to attend a weekend workshop. And as we all know, it’s not unusual for a busy professional to find themselves coming up on the renewal deadline for their license and needing to complete their continuing education requirement quickly. When you need to obtain 30 hours of credit—and you need them now—you can visit our website immediately. Wild Iris provides a convenient, economical alternative.
Another advantage we offer as an online option is our catalog of courses required by the different states around the country. For what we call “travel nurses,” or any nurse, really, who is moving to another state, Wild Iris makes it easy to take the courses required for licensure in other states before you actually move to that state.
Similarly, we serve the needs of “tele-health nurses,” like those who work for insurance companies to take phone calls from customers before they ever get to the doctor’s office. Those nurses have to be licensed in every state in which their customers reside—sometimes in all 50 states. Again, we provide all the mandated continuing education required for them to get licensure in all those different states.
CEOCFO: Do you have a lot of repeat activity once a nurse has taken a course with you? Why are they coming back? Ms. Johnson: Yes, we have a lot of repeat customers. Nurses typically have to renew their license every two years. So when that time rolls around for them, they’ll come back and take some more courses from us. A big reason for this is because our web interface is so easy to use. On most of our competitors’ websites, customers have to set up an account and pay before they can take a course. Our model is just the opposite, since nobody wants to pay for something sight unseen. Essentially, our course content is free. A nurse can read our course and even take the test before ever paying a dime. Once they decide the course has met their needs, then they can register, pay, and immediately print their certificate of completion.
CEOCFO: Was that the concept from the beginning? Ms. Johnson: It was. That’s because the sort of information in our courses is not really proprietary. Anyone can find loads of information online about all the same healthcare topics we address, so it did not make sense to me to keep our content hidden until a customer pays us. In fact, we even have some customers who read our courses not for continuing education credits but because they find our site to be a great resource when, for instance, they are wanting to learn more about their mother’s Alzheimer’s disease and what they can do about it. What this tells us is that among the wide variety of content providers out there, Wild Iris is truly providing a high-quality product. Unlike some of our competitors, we are not offering bargain-basement, high-volume credits for $19.95. That is not our model.
CEOCFO: Who develops the courses? Ms. Johnson: All our courses are written by professionals in the healthcare field. We work with top-notch writers who have a background in both clinical practice and education: nurses, physicians, physical and occupational therapists, and professional medical writers. And as an online business with a product that’s created and distributed digitally, we can work with talented professionals no matter where they are located.
CEOCFO: How often do you come up with new courses or have to update a course? Ms. Johnson: We update all of our existing courses every three years to ensure that the content represents the very latest evidence-based information. This keeps our staff and authors constantly busy.
We add new courses in response to our customers’ needs. For instance, a recent topic that is gaining more and more attention among healthcare providers is the epidemic of what’s called “drug diversion,” in which prescribed medications like narcotics for pain are used for other than their intended medical purpose. It’s a huge problem. In response, some states have begun requiring nurses and other professionals to educate themselves on the topic, and Wild Iris has jumped in to develop the training they need. The same is true for other “hot” topics today—such as child abuse, domestic violence, or pain management—as well as in years past—such as HIV/AIDS when it began to reach epidemic proportions. And we are also constantly developing new courses across the broad spectrum of healthcare topics to continue to grow our catalog.
CEOCFO: How do you maintain the integrity? Ms. Johnson: All our courses must meet the high standards of the American Nurses Credentialing Commission, which is a national branch of the American Nurses Association. Every few years, Wild Iris undergoes a rigorous recertification process by the ANCC to ensure we are adhering to those standards in the development of our courses. We have a team of peer reviewers and content experts who assess the content of each course as it is being developed by the author. It’s a time-consuming process, but we know it results in the high-quality courses that bring our customers back year after year.
Another way we maintain that level of quality is to gather feedback from each customer once they complete a course, both through survey questions as well as written comments. We then review those comments, sometimes making immediate changes to a course and other times incorporating new content as part of the ongoing revision process.
CEOCFO: How do your reach out to prospective customers? Ms. Johnson: Initially, people found out about Wild Iris by word of mouth. Since our early days, we’ve gotten more sophisticated in using evolving technology, and our courses usually rank near the very top of search-engine results. We also send out a regular email newsletter to thousands of nurses, and we are constantly updating our Facebook page. More recently we’ve turned to Google advertising, and our sales figures keep growing.
CEOCFO: Are you typically dealing with individual nurses, or do hospitals and doctors’ offices pay for their nurses’ continuing education? Ms. Johnson: Most nurses pay for their own courses. They often tend to think, “I’d like to take the courses of my own choosing and not the ones my employer might decide I should take.” You’d think hospitals would make sense as a target market for us, but it’s been disappointing trying to convince them to invest in offering continuing education as a perk to their nurses. At the same time, we’ve cultivated a number of corporate clients, and we offer a corporate account option for institutions—such as the insurance providers I mentioned earlier—who send their staff nurses to Wild Iris for their continuing education or licensing needs. And now that Wild Iris has been certified as a women-owned business, we’re hoping to serve corporations who may be required to contract with a certain number of women- or minority-owned businesses. We’ll see.
CEOCFO: What surprised you as Wild Iris has grown and developed over the years? Ms. Johnson: My biggest surprise is that we actually came up with an idea that has worked. Back in 1998 I was nurse with a lot of clinical and educational experience, but I certainly had no business or Internet background. What I did know is that there were three million nurses out there who needed better options for continuing education. So when our website went live on the first day and we sold our first course, it was a great feeling to see that we had created something that people needed.
Another big surprise has been the complexity of working on the Internet and not realizing how fast it would grow. A successful online company is not as simple as creating a storefront and then just changing the window displays every few months. We actually have to stay up to date on all kinds of complex technical skills to be able to meet the challenges of a web-based business. At the moment, we are being faced with the demands of the exploding use of mobile devices. We just revamped our website design to be “mobile friendly.” The efforts of our technical department dwarf the energy our editorial department puts in to developing the courses themselves. But we have to be able to deliver our product where people will find it.
CEOCFO: If we spoke a year from now, what might be different? Ms. Johnson: I am sure that in a year from now we will be meeting new, unknown challenges brought to us by the latest revolution in the tech world. Maybe there will some new Internet device implanted under our skin! Seriously, one of the issues we see on the horizon is what’s called “population health” as a focus for healthcare. We’re developing some new content that addresses that concept. It’s becoming more popular to think about keeping people healthy instead of waiting until their sick, and so I anticipate we’ll have new courses dedicated to that kind of nursing. And just like the problem of drug diversion or the HIV epidemic in years past, who knows what kind of problem will emerge as a major concern for healthcare workers in America. Whatever it is, you can be sure Wild Iris will be addressing it in terms of education. |
“Back in 1998 I was nurse with a lot of clinical and educational experience, but I certainly had no business or Internet background. What I did know is that there were three million nurses out there who needed better options for continuing education. So when our website went live on the first day and we sold our first course, it was a great feeling to see that we had created something that people needed.” - Ann Johnson
Wild Iris Medical Education, Inc.
Ann Johnson, CEO 707-937-0518 ann@wildirismedicaleducation.com
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Ann
Johnson