Medbridge vs Elsevier: A Guide for Education, Competency, and Patient Engagement

When training home healthcare workers, laying a solid foundation for educational success while ensuring nurses are supported in the field is critical. For healthcare leaders looking for foundational training and support in the field, comparing platforms that offer high-quality onboarding, clinical procedure education, and skills and competency training. Two common options are Medbridge and Elsevier, each offering different approaches to supporting providers and patients.

This article provides a detailed comparison of Medbridge vs Elsevier. By examining the breadth of skills and competency training, clinical procedure resources, and patient engagement, decision-makers can better understand which platform aligns with their goals.

Skills Assessment and Competency Tracking

Medbridge’s Skills platform streamlines the onboarding and preceptor process, enabling new nurses to be trained on critical clinical and non-clinical home health and hospice skills, allowing they to start providing patient care faster and document and report on their training and skill competency. This digital solution simplifies skill acquisition, evaluation, and documentation training, while providing more visibility into staff readiness.

The digital skills checklist enables providers to tailor training programs to focus on specific skills and skill levels, while the robust video-based Skills library helps staff acquire home health and hospice-specific skills in bite-sized lessons. The Reporting and Analytics Dashboard helps assign checklists, simplify preceptor assessment, and review skill acquisition and sign-off data on our user-friendly interface. Results feed directly into reporting dashboards, making compliance tracking transparent and easy to audit.

Elsevier, by contrast, offers an extensive reference-driven suite focused on academic and policy-aligned nursing education. Their Clinical Skills library and ClinicalKey content offer in-depth procedural reference materials aligned with institutional policies, supporting large hospitals and health systems focused on compliance and workforce standardization. Elsevier supports competency tracking, but validation workflows are often managed separately through an LMS or manual documentation, resulting in increased friction between educational and operational reporting.

Clinical Procedure Manuals

Medbridge’s Clinical Procedure Manual (CPM) provides clinicians with a single, evidence-based resource to help ensure consistent and accurate care delivery. With tablet-ready, easily searchable procedures approved by an expert review board, the Clinical Procedure Manual helps clinicians refresh procedural knowledge at the point of care and reduce variability in clinical practices through standardized protocols. Medbridge’s CPM provides evidence-based procedure instructions with videos, documentation guidelines designed for the Home Health and Hospice setting.

For a nurse in the field, it can be common to phone their manager to receive guidance on a procedure, or even rely on YouTube/Google when they need a quick refresher. Medbridge’s Clinical Procedure Manual delivers just-in-time guidance that clinicians can access from anywhere with the market’s only tablet-first point-of-care skills resource for home health nurses. This includes trustworthy, expert-reviewed procedure guidance and clear step-by-step instructions and video demos nurses can access anytime, anywhere - even in their patients' driveway.

Elsevier remains a trusted reference for nursing and hospital workflows, offering a large library of detailed written protocols and competency guidance. While comprehensive, the text-heavy experience can make it more challenging for learners to visualize or retain complex procedures compared to Medbridge’s media-rich, scenario-based demonstrations. Elsevier also supports many different settings with the same protocols, meaning they aren’t always taking into account the challenging home care setting with instructions. 

Implementation, Engagement, and Everyday Usability

With Medbridge, implementation is fast and intuitive—leaders can assign CPM modules and skills checklists directly through the Medbridge dashboard, or integrate them with existing LMS systems. Because the platform was built for engagement, clinicians report higher satisfaction and retention compared to traditional eLearning experiences. Medbridge’s Clinical Procedure Manual is also accessible from their Clinician App, making it even easier to access procedures, skills, and protocols when they’re needed. 

Elsevier’s enterprise products offer significant depth but often require more upfront alignment between IT, compliance, and education departments to ensure seamless rollout. Many organizations leveraging Elsevier have purchased the paper version, with a binder in their office, making accessibility in the field a challenge. Elsevier also requires that organizations purchase a separate LMS and/or onboarding tool, meaning an increased budget, more logins, and a more difficult experience for nurses.

Packaging and Procurement 

Medbridge offers tiered plans—from agency-level training to enterprise solutions for large home health organizations—making pilots simple and expansion seamless once adoption is proven.

Elsevier typically structures solutions as enterprise packages across ClinicalKey, Clinical Skills, and eLearning modules, requiring a longer discovery process and contract cycle.

Additional Medbridge Advantages for Home Health

Trusted by Home Health Leaders: Six of the top ten home health agencies choose Medbridge for their software provider, from skills checklists to compliance training.

Proven Success: Medbridge has helped organizations achieve their business and care goals, including one home health agency that saw a 48% increase in nurse retention. See this and other success stories here.

Modern Platform: An intuitive and regularly updated platform providing nurses with familiar experiences and relevant content whenever needed.

CHAP & ACHC Verified: Quality care and onboarding standardization with training courses verified by CHAP and product certified by ACHC.

Clinician Mobile App: Highly rated iOS (4.9 stars) or Android app (4.9 stars) that helps clinicians access Medbridge education and earn CEUs anytime, anywhere.

Robust Home Health Content Library: Through one easy-to-use platform, you can support your entire staff with tools for onboarding, training, mentorship, and clinical excellence at the point of care. Medbridge content is created by industry experts and designed to be interactive, engaging, and practical. Whether you're training nurses, therapists, or other healthcare professionals, Medbridge offers meaningful CEU opportunities for all disciplines—not just one audience. From CEU-eligible podcasts and microlearning refreshers to case-based education and certifications, Medbridge helps reach every kind of learner.

Why Choose Medbridge or Elsevier?

Elsevier provides a comprehensive, respected skills and procedures library that supports clinician competency across various disciplines. The platform’s strengths include trusted, peer-reviewed content that simplifies compliance and skill validation. However, its interface can feel dated, customization options are less flexible than newer platforms, and content engagement is more reference-driven than interactive, making it better suited for large systems focused on standardization rather than hands-on, immersive skills training.

Medbridge offers a complete Home Health ecosystem that goes beyond check-the-box compliance. The Clinical Procedure Manual provides clinicians with immediate, mobile-optimized access to evidence-based procedures, featuring video demonstrations and clear documentation guidelines, which help improve point-of-care decision-making and consistency. The Skills training platform streamlines competency tracking and onboarding through customizable digital checklists and dashboards, replacing cumbersome paper‑based workflows. 

Together, they support both staff education and operational compliance—enhancing efficiency, standardization, and clinician readiness across care settings. Nursing staff can be supported with tools for onboarding, training, mentorship, and clinical excellence at the point of care. With a tablet-optimized platform, Medbridge is built to work out in the field where nurses need to find the right procedures quickly so they can give their patients the high-quality treatment they deserve.