Woods Services, part of Woods System of Care, provides comprehensive lifecycle services for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities, autism, and behavioral health needs. As Woods Services grew, its legacy learning management tools weren’t able to effectively support compliance at scale.
For ANCOR member organizations like Woods Services, building a culture of learning goes beyond meeting requirements — it’s about supporting staff, strengthening consistency, and creating the foundation needed to deliver high-quality, person-centered care. So, its manual processes, duplicate records, and inconsistent tracking created audit risk and administrative burden.
To introduce efficiency across training and compliance processes, Woods Services turned to Relias.
More effective, efficient training system
Woods worked with Relias to modernize and scale its training strategy. The decision was driven by two key needs: improving compliance tracking and reporting accuracy, and access to an extensive training library that could reduce the burden of developing internal content.
Initial implementation focused on deploying core compliance training and establishing a foundational training platform structure.
Over time, however, Woods expanded and optimized its use of the platform. Under the leadership of Senior VP of HR Strategic Operations Erin Drummond, the organization restructured its Relias environment to better support overall workforce development.
“We didn’t want to reinvent the wheel knowing that wheel existed,” said Drummond. Woods introduced requirement trackers to replace manual compliance audits and configured automated supervisor notifications to improve accountability. Training plans were redesigned and scaled across multiple entities, while enhanced reporting capabilities allowed leadership to better monitor training completion and compliance status.
The organization also began leveraging Relias to track continuing education credits for licensed staff and implemented pre- and post-testing to measure training effectiveness. More recently, Woods has begun adopting skills checklists to support competency-based training in areas such as medication administration.
Today, Relias serves as more than a training system — it functions as a strategic tool that helps Woods standardize learning, improve compliance oversight, and support workforce development.
“It skyrocketed our completions,” Drummond said. “We’re in the 99th percentile of module completions.”
Improved administrative efficiency
Prior to partnering with Relias, Woods Services relied on spreadsheets to track training and compliance. This meant, come audit time, its administrators had to wade through a sea of data to know which staff members were out of compliance and which trainings they still needed. Not to mention the manual outreach necessary to inform any out-of-compliance staff members they found. This made completion tracking inconsistent and reporting cumbersome.
“We would be manually exporting to Excel and deleting all the duplicates. It was a disaster,” said Drummond.
This created a system that was “rife with errors.” Using the tools that come standard with Relias, Drummond and her team automated the compliance reporting process. Now, they can quickly find where compliance gaps exist and assign training to fill those gaps. Relias provides a single, centralized platform for supervisors to set up automated notifications for due and overdue training, and for staff to take these trainings.
This has also provided Woods Services with a way to reduce the amount of manual work that goes into the audit preparation process, while streamlining reporting for industry regulators. “We don’t just use it for regulations. We use it as a tool to support employees,” Hammond said.
Organization-wide impact
Because of these advantages, Relias has made an impact at every level of Woods Services’ organization, giving employees across sites easy access to role-specific and upskilling learning opportunities. Offering more than just the trainings necessary for compliance, Relias has helped to create a true culture of learning at Woods Services.
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