Why the Healthcare Industry is Moving to the Cloud

Perhaps no industry has felt the rapid pace of change more than healthcare. Regulatory uncertainty, disruptive new business models, and increasing demands on patient care has more healthcare providers looking for new technology solutions that can help them meet shifting industry dynamics. In fact, recent Deloitte analysisnotedthat more healthcare organizations are converting to cloud-based enterprise systems “to help reduce cost, focus on mission-critical activities, and promote continued enhancements to core clinical systems.”

Healthcare providers needtechnologiesthat keep pace with constant change and stay up-to-date so they can more easily adapt to new regulations and expectations.

Consider what Steve Mena, vice president of operations at Premier Healthcare Services, shared with us: “Our focus is on improving the health of communities. As we look to our future, part of achieving this focus is ensuring we have the best practices and efficiency improvement strategies in place in order to support evolving regulations and expectations around patient care.”

To best equip our healthcare customers for change and their futures, Workday is focused on three fundamental areas:

Employee Engagement.Recruiting and retaining employees is more important than ever in an industry where employees’ impact on patient outcomes is critical. To foster a more engaged workforce, healthcare employers must offer more seamless and efficient experiences so employees can remain focused on patient care, not administrative burdens. We’ve designed Workday to keep employees engaged from recruiting to hiring to retirement, where they can manage the details of their working life—or provide or ask for feedback—at any time, at any location, on any device. And healthcare providers should expect more of that.

Actionable Insights.It’s essential for healthcare leaders to stay informed and adapt as their business and industry requires. A huge part of this is having the flexibility to access real-time data and the ability to analyze it to discover trends and take action when needed. That’s a key reason we’re seeing more healthcare customers try to do more with data in Workday—often combining financial and workforce information with key operational metrics, satisfaction scores, or benchmarks to see what insights they can glean in order to make more timely, confident decisions. It’s also a primary reason that Workday is exploring further ways to provide healthcare leaders with more impactful insights.

根据Gartner的2017年1月“发展中the Healthcare Enterprise Analytics Strategy Primer for 2017” report, “Healthcare CIOs must weave analytics insight into the operational systems that drive value. This includes reducing the data latency that serves as input to analytics environments, but also the operational latency that occurs between when an analytics insight is revealed, to when the appropriate action is taken with that insight. Leading industries measure these latencies in fractions of a second; healthcare delivery is demanding the results for real-time insight and action.”

Premier Healthcare’s Mena agrees, noting that cloud-based systems provide “the insights required to make important decisions regarding quality outcomes, while identifying areas where we can reduce costs and be more efficient as an organization.”

Supply Chain Management.Pressures on reimbursement are requiring providers to cut costs and increase performance, resulting in more scrutiny on the processes and products used to deliver care. Supply chain teams are now expected to play a more strategic role, supporting a variety of initiatives, while still ensuring that routine processes and supply maintenance run smoothly.

Our customers are already doing incredible things using Workday Financial Management as well asWorkday InventoryandWorkday Procurementto streamline routine procurement processes and bring bettermanagement to spend, so they can reduce costs, ensure the right product is available when needed for patient care, and have deeper insights into where money is spent.

As Sandy Cortez, corporate controller at Ernest Health puts it, “We’re focused on understanding changes to our reimbursement and revenue stream, and how we can control costs without compromising patient care.”

“As part of this, we’ve adopted cloud-based systems—like Workday—which not only free up IT resources to focus on other critical areas but also insight into more detailed information, allowing our hospital CFOs and controllers to better identify areas for improvement and cost control,” Cortez added. “This has provided our divisional CFOs greater transparency of information, which has resulted in a better understanding of our challenges and allowed more timely response.”

This year, Workday customers can expect us to continue adding depth to our supply chain management functionality to meet their inventory and procurement needs.

This is a unique time for the healthcare industry. It’s more critical than ever that healthcare providers have systems that change as they change, and provide the insights needed to make more informed decisions on their organizations’ futures. We are dedicated to executing on our vision for healthcare, which includes leveraging a technology foundation built for change, and one that better enables providers to adapt to whatever comes next.

To learn more about why healthcare providers are moving to the cloud and how Workday helps customers prepare for change, visit Workday in booth No. 7653 atHIMSS 2017, Feb. 19-23, in Orlando.