Northwell Health streamlines Covid-19 staffing with Oracle

In February and March 2020, the number of Covid-19 cases in New York grew at an alarming rate. With no effective antiviral or vaccine available to treat or prevent the disease, Northwell’s 27 New York hospitals were in danger of becoming overwhelmed with an influx of infected patients.

The company needed a way to monitor available nursing resources, predict upcoming staffing needs, and accommodate a continually shifting patient load during the pandemic.

Data analysts at Northwell scrambled to extract employee scheduling data from their Kronos Time and Attendance system and combine it with patient census data from multiple hospitals to plan for its workforce needs. Data was decentralized and managed by individual hospitals. The analysts used Excel spreadsheets to crunch the numbers and help administrators understand staffing shortages at each hospital and unit.

Bringing in data from multiple flat files proved difficult and time consuming. HR professionals at the company were also tasked with gathering information about staffing resources from a variety of external sources. Because of the pandemic, Northwell had to expedite the onboarding and validation processes for an influx of about 700 temporary employees.

Prior to COVID-19, Northwell chose Oracle Cloud technology as the foundation for evolving its HR practices.

After assessing enterprise solutions, decision-makers at Northwell concluded that Oracle Cloud was the right choice for creating a culture of analytics at the company. They recognized the value of real-time data displayed in dashboards, giving clinical leaders a dependable source of information to support business decisions.

Northwell used Oracle Analytics to rationalize, synthesize, and display staff scheduling data and patient census information from dozens of hospitals. It used an HR dashboard in Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management to help chief nursing officers and HR leaders stay abreast of patient inflows, staff recruitment, and resource requirements—especially the critical-care nurses and respiratory therapists that are required for each shift.

Old spreadsheets were converted into a format that can be directly consumed by Oracle Analytics Cloud along with a custom integration between Kronos and propagated through digital charts, graphs, and maps. Now all file feeds are automated. There are no more spreadsheets and no need for people to be involved with data input.

The dashboard helps Northwell’s clinical leaders interpret the data so they can make informed decisions about where augmented staff should be deployed to optimize patient care. Single sign-on enables users to log in seamlessly from multiple applications.

The solution not only provides a single source of truth for visualizing real-time staffing information, but the automation also frees up multiple full-time employees from manual spreadsheet maintenance so they can be reallocated to more productive and valuable activities.

Northwell Health and Deloitte teamed to deliver a solution that is built to help the enterprise evolve and stay ready to navigate disruption. Baker Tilly also partnered with Northwell on its transformation.