Healthcare training can deliver measurable ROI by helping organizations reduce training costs, improve employee retention, accelerate onboarding, strengthen competency and compliance, and improve care quality. For healthcare leaders, measuring training success requires looking beyond course completion rates.
The real question is, “What changed because employees were better prepared?”
Answers can take many forms here:
- Reduced costs
- Stronger retention
- Lower organizational risk
- Faster onboarding
- Better care outcomes
How can healthcare training reduce costs?
Training requires an investment. But delivering and administering it inefficiently can create additional costs through staff time, manual processes, redundant course development, and time away from patient care.
Relias customers have demonstrated what’s possible when those processes become more efficient. Cleveland Area Hospital reported $94,000 in annual savings through streamlined learning, while UnitedHealthcare Community Plan reported $40,000 in monthly savings passed along to clients.
Independent research demonstrates similar potential. A 2024 study in The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing found that implementing a digital competency management system saved one pediatric hospital $500,000 in training costs while reducing nursing professional development workload and improving staff satisfaction.
That makes sound healthcare training efficiency more than an administrative benefit. It can become a measurable component of ROI.
How can training improve employee retention?
Workforce development can also affect one of healthcare’s most expensive challenges: turnover.
Across care settings, KenCrest achieved a 25% increase in retention, while six of seven new-nurse cohorts at Mercy Health St. Mary’s achieved 100% retention at the one-year mark. Virginia Mason also reported a 37% increase in nurse satisfaction, while Kitsap achieved a 58% internal promotion rate.
Those outcomes have substantial potential financial value.
A 2026 study involving 1,501 medical-surgical nurses across seven hospitals calculated the core cost of RN turnover at approximately $37,706 per nurse. When contract-labor replacement was necessary, that figure reached $85,498 per nurse.
Meanwhile, a 2023 systematic review found continuing professional training and development were associated with greater intention to stay and lower intention to leave, particularly across healthcare populations.
Workforce development doesn’t have to prevent hundreds of departures to create value. Even incremental retention improvements can potentially offset a significant portion of an organization’s learning investment.
How can healthcare training improve onboarding?
The economics of retention are also closely connected to onboarding. Orientation represents a substantial portion of the cost associated with replacing healthcare workers. The more effective and efficient you can make it, the better. That makes the 6.5 days Memorial Hermann streamlined post-hire orientation with Relias an enticing metric to go for.
Especially combined with the cost of turnover, helping employees reach competency sooner can create value through both workforce readiness and reduced orientation expense.
In short, effective healthcare training can make onboarding less about completing a predetermined number of training hours and more about preparing each employee to perform successfully.
How does healthcare training help reduce organizational risk?
ROI isn’t limited to dollars saved directly. Preventing costly problems can be equally valuable.
St. Luke’s Health System recorded an 18% improvement in knowledge, while Columbia Basin Health Association achieved 94%+ annual training completion rates and 83%-95% annual compliance rates.
Relias’ own crisis-prevention research reinforces the importance of sustained learning. Our 2022 Crisis Prevention and Intervention Training Report found that clinicians who received crisis training multiple times per year reported greater confidence than those receiving training only annually, while 41% of respondents wanted additional opportunities to practice crisis-intervention skills.
Workforce outcomes can affect patient outcomes in other ways, too. In 2025, JAMA Network Open research found that higher RN turnover was associated with increased patient falls, illustrating how workforce stability, clinical quality, risk, and financial performance can intersect.
In healthcare, competency gaps can become organizational risks. Therefore, consistent education gives leaders another way to connect learning metrics with compliance, workforce readiness, and risk-management priorities.
Can better healthcare training improve patient care?
Ultimately, one of the strongest demonstrations of learning ROI is improved care.
Relias customers have reported outcomes including a 50% decrease in readmission rates at Villa Healthcare, a 35% reduction in massive transfusion protocols during the first year at Texas Children’s Hospital, and 93rd-percentile patient satisfaction scores at Oklahoma Heart Hospital.
Research increasingly demonstrates that workforce education can be measured against clinical outcomes as well.
A 2024 randomized study published in The Journal of Continuing Education in Nursing found that C. difficile infection rates declined significantly following nursing education interventions. Importantly for you, both educational approaches studied generated positive financial ROI.
Better outcomes start with better content
Technology alone cannot produce those results. What employees actually learn matters.
That’s why Relias develops healthcare education through an in-house content organization that combines adult-learning specialists, healthcare education experts, clinicians, and dozens of subject matter experts who help assess, create, review, and update education.
That expertise supports more than 4,000 continuing education courses, 8,000 unique content assets, 7,000 hours of education, and more than 1,000 accredited courses meeting ANCC guidelines.
Rather than forcing healthcare organizations to build and continually maintain all of that education themselves, Relias provides content designed specifically around healthcare workforce needs.
How should healthcare organizations measure training ROI?
Course completion remains important, particularly for compliance. However, completion shouldn’t be the finish line for measuring learning ROI.
Look instead at the outcomes that matter to the organization:
- Did turnover decrease?
- Did onboarding become faster?
- Did employees demonstrate greater competency?
- Did compliance improve?
- Did training costs decline?
- Did patient outcomes change?
Those questions move the conversation from, “How much training did we deliver?” to, “What did our investment accomplish?”
And when the outcomes speak for themselves, the ROI of workforce education becomes much easier to demonstrate.
Relias Can Help You and Your Team Where It Matters
Your healthcare learning platform should do more than deliver courses. With expert-built healthcare content, compliance and patient experience suites, regulatory updates, Relias helps organizations connect training to outcomes that matter.
Explore the Relias Platform →
