Inspire Delivers Personalized Sales Training Using Allego

Situation: Maintaining Positive Patient Experiences in a Hybrid Landscape

Inspire Medical Systems is dedicated to delivering positive patient outcomes with its innovative sleep apnea product. Its commitment to patient health requires ensuring that both its sales force and its customers have a deep understanding of the complexities and struggles patients face with obstructive sleep apnea.

The company was growing its sales force rapidly and needed to onboard and train new hires with varying levels of industry expertise. Andy Durstock, Director of Patient Outcomes and Clinical Effectiveness at Inspire Medical Systems, oversees six managers across different divisions within the company.

“Every quarter we’re hiring 40, 50 people. We hire from a lot of different backgrounds into our industry. So some of the stuff that we deal with is pretty technical,” Durstock said.

Situation: Maintaining Positive Patient Experiences in a Hybrid Landscape

Inspire Medical Systems is dedicated to delivering positive patient outcomes with its innovative sleep apnea product. Its commitment to patient health requires ensuring that both its sales force and its customers have a deep understanding of the complexities and struggles patients face with obstructive sleep apnea.

The company was growing its sales force rapidly and needed to onboard and train new hires with varying levels of industry expertise. Andy Durstock, Director of Patient Outcomes and Clinical Effectiveness at Inspire Medical Systems, oversees six managers across different divisions within the company.

“Every quarter we’re hiring 40, 50 people. We hire from a lot of different backgrounds into our industry. So some of the stuff that we deal with is pretty technical,” Durstock said.

Challenge: Onboarding New Hires Virtually

Prior to COVID, Inspire relied on Sharepoint as the primary way sales reps could access some training content. It didn’t have a tool to help deliver new hire onboarding virtually or an easy way to centralize and distribute training content. Once the pandemic hit, Durstock recognized that the company needed to find a new solution to effectively train its rapidly growing organization.

“We didn’t have a platform like this at all. We were just a growing organization. Our previous process was old school, really old school,” Durstock noted.

Solution: Building Content and Certification Programs at Scale with Allego

Inspire turned to Allego to revamp its onboarding and certification processes not only for employees, but also for surgeons and customers. The company especially valued Allego for the platform’s ability to deliver learning in the flow of work.

“It really helped when COVID hit to utilize this platform. My number one thing I love about Allego is the mobile use. As a sales organization, our reps are out in the field. They hardly have their laptops on. The mobile use of Allego is where we use it all the time,” Durstock said.

Prior to rolling out Allego to the broader organization, Durstock worked with his team to build out content for an onboarding and certification program. This gave them the opportunity to go through the program themselves to ensure smooth adoption by the sales organization.

“We all went through a training so we could experience it for ourselves, so we could understand what was quick and easy. We had a little bit of passion behind “Oh, I love this piece. Or I love that piece.” That’s how we started; ride it first and then ask other people to jump on board.”

Inspire is now using Allego as both an in-person and virtual resource for onboarding and certification. After classroom training, the company delivers a self-paced certification program with just the push of a button, making it easy to scale across its rapidly growing organization.

Inspire reaped tremendous value from these self-paced learning programs. They not only empowered employees to spend more time engaging with newer content, they offered the flexibility to speed through more familiar areas.

“For the learning programs, those self-paced programs were a lifesaver for us,” Durstock said. “Some people come with a lot of implantable device experience. Some people come with none. So they can cruise through the implantable stuff and struggle sometimes with other things. So the learning program being self-paced is a game changer, it’s saved us.”

Allego also enabled Inspire to personalize the learning experience for customers. Even after completing a certification, Inspire’s customers can return to the platform at their convenience to share best practices or access just-in-time learning to take their training to the next level.

Inspire has seen great success using Allego flashcards as a part of its six-part certification process. The program serves up 10 flashcards a day to all learners, which are then scored prior to being able to advance to the next stage of their learning program.

“We use flashcards to show images of different wave forms and electrical currents and ask, ‘Is this good or bad?’ The image comes up and you have to select is this a good winner or a bad one? Then it shows why it’s good or not after you select your choice. That’s hard to teach sometimes, but it works,” said Durstock.

Inspire feels that using flashcards has not only been simple and efficient for ongoing reinforcement of highly technical information and processes, but also has found that employees love them for being quick and easy and accessible from their mobile devices.

Results: Delivering Self-Paced and Personalized Learning

With Allego, Inspire created a modern, mobile learning experience for new hires, veteran employees, and customers. Personalized programs gave users always-on access to all of the information needed to take training to the next level. It enabled employees and customers to spend more time engaging with new and unfamiliar content and cruise through more familiar information with flexible self-paced learning programs.

Inspire also found simple ways to deliver ongoing reinforcement of technical information and processes efficiently that employees loved for being both quick and easy.

Within just six months, Inspire Medical System has seen over 51,000 views of its flashcards. “We have seen really good success using flashcards. That’s the number one thing we hear from the employees is they love those things. They’re really quick on their mobile devices. They work really, really well,” said Durstock.