Outreach and Netsmart Empower Staff Training and Streamline Onboarding

Introduction

When Outreach, a human services provider in New York, sought to improve its internal training processes, it turned to the Netsmart Resource Center for support. What began as an exploratory step quickly evolved into a foundational part of their onboarding and learning strategy—saving time, closing knowledge gaps and improving user confidence across teams.

Problem

Before adopting the Netsmart Resource Center, Outreach relied entirely on internal efforts to build training content from scratch. Elva Aguilar, EHR Coordinator and Quality Assurance Specialist at Outreach, described it as “being left to our own devices.” Her team had to create client scenarios, develop labs and produce videos using only their test system. The training materials needed to be updated, time-consuming to maintain and prone to inconsistency—especially during implementations or system updates.

Live onboarding sessions often defaulted to demo-style presentations with limited engagement, and end users had minimal context before training began. Aguilar and her supervisor, both highly knowledgeable about the solution, identified opportunities to bridge the gap between their own system expertise and that of new team members unfamiliar with myAvatar.

Solution

The turning point came after Aguilar met with Netsmart and the Human Services Learning and Adoption Consortium. Seeing all available training content at once was eye-opening. “That’s when we started using the Netsmart Resource Center in our learning management system,” she said.

Outreach began incorporating both standalone and comprehensive courses—such as Telehealth eLearning and myAvatar CareConnect Inbox—into their Learning Management System (LMS). The eLearning files were plug-and-play. “We didn’t need any type of additional support,” Aguilar said. “We just downloaded it, uploaded it and we've been able to use those since.”

Now, new hires complete on-demand learning modules before attending live trainings, turning those sessions into collaborative discussions rather than one-way demos. “It provides them with a foundation. They come to us with more questions. It’s a more seamless and enjoyable process.”

The Netsmart Resource Center also improved efficiency on the support side. Aguilar’s team now checks it first before submitting support tickets. “We can get our answer within 10 to 15 minutes,” she said. Even when they still need help, the Netsmart Resource Center gives them the language and clarity to ask more specific questions, streamlining communication with the Netsmart support team.

Result

With training content updated and centralized, Outreach has modernized its onboarding process and begun shifting its internal culture toward self-paced, digital learning. The Resource Center has helped Outreach:

• Save time during new hire onboarding
• Improve engagement and understanding in live trainings
• Reduce documentation errors by giving users clearer context
• Lower the number of unnecessary support tickets
• Update legacy training materials and labs with current screenshots and terminology

Though Outreach is still building formal metrics around course completion and confidence levels, feedback from early adopters has been positive. “The folks who have taken the initiative to really hone in on our LMS have already come to us with a lot of positive feedback,” Aguilar noted.

Closing

Outreach is continuing to expand its use of the Netsmart Resource Center. Aguilar encourages other organizations to start by exploring what already exists: “Check the Netsmart Resource Center first before you start doing anything on your own. It helps in ways you don’t even understand sometimes—just the language in the Netsmart Resource Center is like, that’s what I need to say.”

By embedding on-demand learning into their workflow, Outreach has empowered staff, improved training quality and created a stronger foundation for future growth.