Advocate Health Creates Engaging Onboarding at Scale with Vyond

Challenge

After a series of mergers and acquisitions, teams at Advocate Health discovered the organization offered multiple orientation programs for their base of 40,000+ nurses nationally. It was an inefficient use of training resources that yielded inconsistent content. 

So the Nursing Education & Professional Development, Enterprise Learning Experience, and Content teams partnered to develop a single comprehensive program for onboarding nurses nationally. Doing so would ensure a consistent experience for new hires — and allow individual sites and units to focus more on creating content about their speciality areas. 

The tool they chose for the project was Vyond. “We were already using it for a lot of other things,” says Crystal Gellin, an education designer for Nursing Education & Professional Development. “We’ve found it so easy to use — it’s a very highly liked software in our department and at Advocate.”

Approach

With recommendations from an Advocate Content team audit in hand, project sponsors proposed the creation of a new six-week series, woven together with an ongoing detective story.

From there, the Nursing Education & Professional Development and Enterprise Learning Experience teams took the reins, first agreeing on the styles, color palette, characters, and backgrounds they’d use for a cohesive look and feel. They opted for an animated style with mixed-media elements like software screenshots and simulations. 

After three months of development, the new orientation course launched in March 2025 to the first new cohorts of nurses, and the team continues to monitor program outcomes.

How Vyond Helped

The team praised Vyond’s versatility and collaboration features for helping them get the job done. “Vyond has been a great tool to enable the storytelling we wanted. And it was really easy for us to share characters and assets,” says Kayla Sell, training coordinator for Nursing Education & Professional Development.  

Vyond’s template library got its share of shoutouts, as well as AI image generation for creating bespoke backgrounds and specific objects. “It’s been nice to have some consistency in the style and also the freedom to make exactly what I need, as I need it,” Kayla says.

“AI voices and text to speech are definitely features we’ve been using a lot and that’ll save us a lot of time down the road,” adds Crystal. “They sound very, very real, so we aren’t having to do our own voice-overs. And they’ll make edits and updates much easier.” 

Reflecting on this project, Nikki Morawski, an instructional designer on the Enterprise Learning Experience team, thinks its success will lead to more requests for improved content. “Vyond is becoming very popular at Advocate. It’s entertaining. It’s engaging. It’s gonna grow exponentially because everybody loves it.” 

Nikki Morawski
Instructional Designer, Enterprise Learning Experience, Advocate Health

“Vyond is becoming very popular at Advocate. It’s entertaining. It’s engaging. It’s gonna grow exponentially because everybody loves it.”