With patient data regulated by increasingly stringent privacy regulations, complex organizational structures, and a knowledgeable patient base that expects targeted patient-centered care, healthcare providers are under increasing pressure to modernize their data and tech infrastructure. The good news: cloud applications are transforming healthcare organizations and accelerating the standard of patient care.
Bob Evans, founder of Cloud Wars, spoke with John Kravitz, Vice President and Head of Healthcare and Go to Market at Workday, about how the company is becoming a leader in providing transformative healthcare technology. Kravitz began by explaining how Workday utilized powerful new technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to give customers better outcomes.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning help fulfill the promise of patient-centered care by learning from past patient records,” said Kravitz. “Already, we have seen AI and ML applied to help with diagnosis, to help with automation, to help guide our care recommendations, and so much more. And, we’re seeing the promise of generative AI which will take all the dictation and notes and help summarize the diagnosis.”
Kravitz explained how the Workday enterprise management system is delivering on the promise of patient-centered care, citing the company’s work on the patient-centered supply chain — providing patient supplies required for surgical procedures in the acute care environment.
“With Workday Supply Chain Management, we see machine learning play a role that is really important to get the right supplies for elective surgeries and patients that are in patient-centered medical homes,” said Kravitz. “There’s just such a need for these supplies, to keep things moving on time, and keep the trains in motion.”
Beyond this, Workday’s use of AI and ML technologies in the healthcare space is:
- Helping to align skills that employees possess with job requirements
- Learning from the past and making recommendations for future work
- Analyzing skill gaps and recommending learning to develop new skills
- Optimizing the workforce
“We don’t want to take people out of the equation,” said Kravitz. “We want to support the work that people do and personalize the experience for each user, ensuring they get in and find what they need, complete the task, and then return to patient care.”
Customer-Focused Enhancements
Kravitz explained how Workday enables its healthcare customers to extract the maximum value from its software. “We have one version of our software and we provide updates to that on a semi-annual basis,” said Kravitz. “We take a large percentage of the work, and we create base changes to our system based upon what our customers are telling us. This allows us, on a semi-annual basis, to really start turning that flywheel sooner, to provide much more enhanced functionality to our end users.”
Workday is delivering outcomes that match the needs of healthcare providers by listening to what those needs are and responding accordingly. “The talent shortage seems to be the biggest challenge since the pandemic,” said Kravitz. “People are struggling, salaries have increased because of the competition, people have changed careers, they’ve left healthcare. So healthcare organizations are struggling.”
Ultimately, organizations need an HR process to bring people on quickly. “One of our customers cited a 25% increase in the ability to hire staff,” said Kravitz. “These are really tangible results for us.” Yet, the talent shortage isn’t the only pain point. In another example, Kravitz explained how Workday Strategic Sourcing enabled a prominent West Coast healthcare system to save $4.2 million in the first six months of using the software.
Multi-Industry Experience Drives Digital Innovation in Healthcare
Workday operates across many different industries and, as such, is presented with a broad spectrum of challenges. These challenges range from cybersecurity concerns to compliance requirements, and this high-level perspective has enabled Workday to help healthcare companies navigate the complex digital landscape successfully.
Before coming to Workday, Kravitz worked as a healthcare CIO. In that capacity, he pushedforward with cloud-based solutions only over on-prem development. The cloud enables customers in these scenarios:
- To scale easily
- To leverage the use of the environment for high availability
- To benefit from continuity of services in the advent of a disaster
“At Workday, we have a true Enterprise Management Cloud for healthcare, the same cloud for all systems, all environments, and all industries,” said Kravitz. “The Workday platform is built on an intelligent data core that takes security, privacy, compliance, organizational hierarchy, analytics, and business processes into account as the foundation for this dynamic platform.”
Workday’s intelligent data core is where all the data resides, but layered on top are specific applications such as financial management, human capital management, supply chain management, and enterprise planning and reporting. While some companies migrate to the cloud, Workday’s intelligent data core is cloud-native. “All the frameworks were built with the cloud in mind from day one,” said Kravitz. “I think that’s an important factor.”
Kravitz noted the importance of partners and industry expertise in delivering the best healthcare solutions to customers. “With the newest offering we have an industry accelerator for healthcare. We’re working with a couple of our partners, and we really want to work with those industry leaders that have best practices and industry innovation.”
