Adventist Health standardizes processes to support growth
With Oracle Cloud ERP, EPM, and HCM, the healthcare company improved inventory management, cut its budgeting cycle in half, and can integrate new acquisitions in just months.
“The benefit is knowing there are people at Oracle who are going to be with us on this journey. We can all learn from each other, and that will go a long way to staying on the cutting edge.”
Business challenges
At California-based Adventist Health, serving the underserved is a way of life. The not-for-profit healthcare organization operates 23 acute-care hospitals, many of which are in rural areas in the western US with no other local healthcare providers. Like other healthcare organizations, however, Adventist Health must balance its patient-care objectives with the industry's push toward modernization.
As Adventist Health doubled its size to 30,000 employees, 23 hospitals, and 250 clinics, the technology it acquired forced it to run like a collection of clinics rather than a unified healthcare system. It had dozens of different ways to perform basic finance and human resources tasks. To change that approach, the leadership team drove a cloud conversion using Oracle Cloud applications.
If we can make it way more efficient for our leaders to have the information they need, then they have more time to live our mission, to share God's love, and be present with our patients and people who we interact with.
Why Adventist Health chose Oracle
Adventist Health turned to Oracle Cloud ERP, EPM, HCM, Autonomous Data Warehouse, and Analytics applications not only to create one standard operating model across the company, but also to help it integrate new acquisitions much faster. Looking ahead, Adventist Health considered Oracle to be the best long-term partner to help the company cope with inevitable changes—adopting new industry best practices, keeping up with regulations, and moving into new businesses.
Results
Adventist Health began its cloud implementation with Oracle Analytics and Oracle Enterprise Performance Management cloud applications. Soon after, it implemented Oracle Cloud ERP and Oracle Cloud HCM applications all at once, in a “big bang” approach.
The first key benefit came from standardizing processes across the organization, so instead of dozens of ways to book a payment or pay an employee, there is one standard operating model. Just as important, the platform helps support Adventist Health’s growth, since it now can integrate a new acquisition in weeks or months, rather than the years it once took. And Adventist Health gained the benefit of speed, so when the company changes a process, it can quickly implement it across the organization.
For example, using Oracle Cloud HCM’s payroll module, Adventist Health consolidated roughly 600 different ways the clinics used to pay nurses. Using Oracle Cloud ERP, the team revised descriptions of 395,000 inventory items, from surgical tools to stethoscopes, to replenish them more accurately. And with Oracle Cloud EPM, the team cut its annual budget planning cycle in half.
Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, improves data processing, security, and quality for increasing data volumes and concurrent users while delivering 60% cost savings, eliminating administration, and up to 10X faster complex query responses for revenue cycle insights. Advanced analytics with machine learning and natural language processing help accelerate revenue cycle insights and acquisition integrations with greater flexibility from independent, streamlined data models. Oracle Data Safe, included with the Autonomous Data Warehouse, helps Adventist Health with user activity monitoring and improves visibility to detect configuration drift, helping them address their security and compliance needs.