Healthcare and human services organizations are grappling with intense competition for direct care providers amid increasing financial pressures. As entities confront hard talent recruitment and retention choices, leaders depend on data to help make the best business decisions. However, those decisions are often delayed due to incomplete or inaccurate data, or cumbersome collection and analysis processes.
During a Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by Workday, Sarah Hickman Auger, industry director for healthcare solution marketing at Workday, moderated a discussion with Carol Dudzinski, director of enterprise applications at Keystone Human Services, and Rebecca Dunn, senior value manager at Workday, about having enterprise-quality technology that yields clean, real-time data that can drive better, faster business decisions.
Three key insights were:
1. A consolidated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is critical for workforce planning and growth initiatives. Many organizations in the health and human services sector are still using disparate systems to monitor budgets and manually manage employee timesheets, expenses, supplier invoices and other inputs. Relying on such systems for day-to-day management, as well as for broader strategic initiatives such as scaling operations, entering new markets or acquiring new physician groups, is hugely inefficient.
Keystone, which provides support to people with disabilities, previously relied on a patchwork of workforce, payroll and financial planning systems before adopting Workday's centralized, cloud-based ERP platform in 2018. "We're now able to create dashboards for our operational leadership so that they can view trends in hiring or terminations and work with the recruiting partners to [address short-staffed areas] in a more timely manner," Ms. Dudzinski said.
2. Real-time data gives a competitive edge to acute and non-acute healthcare organizations. Data that is delivered to decision makers as soon as it is available not only helps manage contingent labor staffing and reduce associated costs, but also shortens strategic planning cycle times. For example, Workday's data capabilities and data transparency can support reallocation of staff to higher-value-added activities, such as service expansion into new areas, instead of having team members load data into models, Ms. Dunn said.
In addition, Workday's platform enables organizations acquiring new physician groups or long-term care facilities to migrate the acquired companies' own systems into Workday, while allowing for gradual phase-in of some specific workflows. When Keystone acquired a New Jersey subsidiary, it dynamically configured the subsidiary's distinct time-off model to match Workday's centralized time-off model.
3. Creating a business case for investing in a unified cloud platform is key, including for smaller non-acute care providers. Organizations considering migrating their systems but struggling to articulate a business case for it can follow these five steps to achieve clarity and evaluate vendors:
- Understand your purpose and strategic goals. Questions to ask include: What are the three to five strategic things you're working toward over the next few years? How can technology be an enabler to achieving those goals?
- Create a baseline, so you can start to articulate for the future. That baseline could include data on current technology spend, current spend on legacy systems and future growth events.
- Identify areas of efficiency you're hoping to get out of a new system. One important element may be automating manual or transactional tasks; industry benchmarks and third-party data can help pinpoint other relevant areas.
- Determine key performance indicators to measure success. Commonly used KPIs include cost of turnover, controllable overtime and contingent labor spend.
- Plan for future growth. It is important to keep in mind the specific needs of the organization, including the needs of all internal stakeholder groups. "Don't just purchase [a new system] from the IT perspective but ensure that it's meeting the needs of the entire organization as you move forward," Ms. Dudzinski said.
As healthcare and human services organizations of all types and sizes weigh the costs and benefits of replacing legacy systems with cloud-based ERP systems, they must factor in the risks of not moving forward.
"We know that legacy systems are causing issues with siloed data, which makes it so hard to make decisions that you run the risk of missing out on market opportunities," Ms. Dunn said. "Investing in a [unified] system and getting your infrastructure in place means that as new opportunities present themselves, your organization is ready to take advantage of that. Getting this in place now allows you to continue to grow without having to re-implement, redeploy and make another decision in the future."