Elsevier launches HESI's Personalized Learning Plan to improve nursing students' clinical readiness

Incorporating Elsevier's trusted content, the market's first AI-powered personalized, remediation tool of its kind gives nursing students and faculty a learning experience that adapts to their needs.

NEW YORK, Jan. 27, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Elsevier has launched HESI's Personalized Learning Plan (PLP) in North America to give nursing students and faculty a flexible and smarter learning solution, to help them better prepare for their high-stakes assessments and entry into clinical practice. Using the latest AI capabilities, HESI's PLP features expanded and engaging content that adapts to the specific needs of each student, giving tailored, precise support to help prepare the next generation of nurses.

Remediation is a crucial part of nursing education, helping students strengthen their skills to pass their HESI exams and the U.S. National Council Licensure Examination (NCLEX) ensuring clinical readiness and career success.

In fourth quarter of 2025, the NCLEX-RN first-time U.S.-educated pass rate declined to 81.2%, bringing the 2025 annual pass rate to 86.7% which is nearly a 5% decrease year over year. In practical terms, this means fewer candidates passing on their first attempt compared to the same period last year. 

This downward shift underscores the ongoing need for proactive, programmatic and personalized student support to sustain licensure readiness. The implications extend beyond test outcomes – lower pass rates can delay licensure, reduce workforce readiness, and ultimately strain patient care capacity.

While remediation is central to addressing this challenge, current solutions are too often difficult and not engaging, creating a significant barrier to student progression – HESI's PLP tackles this challenge head on.

Students using HESI's PLP benefit from a range of features:

• Precise, AI-powered recommendations based on students' specific exam performance – down to the exact item.
• Microlearning flexibility includes small, manageable chunks of content, making it easier to fit learning into a busy schedule.
• Expanded content in diverse formats, including Elsevier's Osmosis tutorial videos, adaptive quizzing, case studies and eBooks with multilingual audio.
• Motivating progress tracking to keep students engaged, with milestone celebrations and adaptive guidance.

HESI's PLP also supports faculty in two core areas:

• Instructor driven customization – faculty can tailor learning plans to address student needs and set performance benchmarks and completion requirements.
• Real-time analytics that show at-a-glance performance data for cohorts or individual students that can be filtered by assignment, content type and activity, enabling informed intervention.

Brent Gordon, President of Healthcare Education at Elsevier said: "Our ongoing mission is to help nursing educators improve learning outcomes and clinical readiness for future healthcare professionals at scale by delivering innovative and AI-enabled learning and assessment solutions. HESI's Personalized Learning Plan provides individualized student support, helping them to identify and address knowledge gaps with Elsevier's evidence-based, engaging content. By reshaping remediation in nursing education, we can improve exam performance and ultimately, have more nurses entering the health system confident and practice ready."

Madeline Weatherford, a nursing student at Northwest Nazarene University said: "HESI's Personalized Learning Plan is really accessible and well organized and definitely helped me retain a lot of information. The functionality allows me to listen to the content on a walk or when travelling to school, which makes it much more flexible and easier to fit into my busy schedule. Overall, the product makes remediation feel less overwhelming and more manageable."

You can find out more about HESI's PLP here.

About Elsevier

Elsevier is a global leader in advanced information and decision support. For over a century, we have been helping advance science and healthcare to advance human progress. We support academic and corporate research communities, doctors, nurses, future healthcare professionals and educators across 170 countries in their vital work. We do this by delivering mission-critical insights and innovative solutions that combine trusted, evidence-based scientific and medical content with cutting-edge AI technologies to help impact makers achieve better outcomes. We champion inclusion and sustainability by embedding these values into our products and culture, working with the communities that we serve. The Elsevier Foundation supports research and health partnerships around the world.

Elsevier is part of RELX, a global provider of information-based analytics and decision tools for professional and business customers. For more information, visit www.elsevier.com and follow us on social media @elsevierconnect.

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SOURCE Elsevier Limited