Internally, organisations face challenges such as burnout, low employee retention and talent shortages, and the need to accommodate ever-increasing budget demands, while externally, they face growing and ageing populations, rising obesity rates and escalating rates of cancer, mental illness, diabetes and more.
Queensland Health is one organisation leading the way in addressing these issues with its HealthQ32 vision, which explicitly calls out the need for a sustainable health system and a valued, respected, and empowered workforce. The organisation is also transforming in the broader context of the Even Better Public Sector for Queensland strategy 2024-28, and a cloud-based human resources and financial management system is ideally placed to help realise these objectives.
For example, the strategy incorporates the goal to come together across public sector organisations to respond to complex challenges and cloud-based platforms and applications such as those provided by Workday are specifically built to manage change and adaptation.
From the public sector strategy, these include identifying the skills the state needs now and, in the future, growing these skills across the sector, and fostering future generations of diverse, purpose-driven leaders. From HealthQ32, these include ensuring Queensland’s health workforce is valued, respected and empowered to lead the delivery of world-class health services, each working to the top of their scope of practice. The organisation’s focus areas include supporting and retaining the current workforce; building new pipelines of talent; and adapting and innovating new ways to deliver.
Workday’s Skills Cloud can help the organisation better align its talent with opportunities, while Peakon Employee Voice enables the organisation to listen to employees for insights it can use to improve performance and engagement, reducing attrition rates. Augmented analytics provides AI and machine learning-powered insights that drive more informed and effective decision-making around people, while automating attract-to-pay minimises the time and costs of the process while minimising errors. Compensation and benefits tools can deliver more sophisticated and targeted remuneration and rewards actions, while a workforce and enterprise management solution can help foster engagement and build efficiency with improved frontline worker scheduling and management.
Delivering on these objectives is critical. According to the Health Workforce for Queensland Strategy to 2032 consultation paper, published in 2023, 7.2% of Queensland Health’s permanent workforce left the organisation in the previous year, while, over the next 10 years, the state will need an additional 45,000 staff working in its health system.
Intuitiveness and ease of use of an asset for healthcare organisations
The intuitiveness and ease of use of cloud-based human resources, financial management and planning is a considerable asset in the pursuit of efficiency and agility in healthcare. Organisations in this sector can now reap the rewards of adopting powerful features with ease, and secure increased reliability, safety, security and lower cost of ownership.
Workday combines agility and depth of functionality to present a compelling opportunity to the sector. For example, an ‘adopt, not adapt’ approach means features are pre-built and can be configured rather than customised to meet healthcare organisations’ needs. In addition, adapting new features to a healthcare organisation’s needs in a cloud-native system such as Workday can take less than a day.
Improving teams’ performance and agility
With SaaS-based systems, teams at healthcare organisations become more autonomous, data-driven and engaged because they can easily find and act on the information they need, when they need it. These teams and their organisations can also seamlessly adapt systems to their changing needs. However, help is still available when needed. Cloud-native providers like Workday and its partners can provide ongoing support and guidance to ensure healthcare organisations are maximising the return on their investment and operating with confidence.
Effective cyber security is also critical for healthcare organisations, which typically capture a raft of sensitive personal and financial data from individuals and interact with a wide range of service providers. Security resides at the core of Workday’s culture, processes, and technologies, and this extends to achieving a range of assessments and authorisations relevant to healthcare organisations in the private and public sectors.
Delivering customer transformations
Workday’s platform and applications are already delivering transformative improvements to healthcare organisations in Australia and New Zealand. For example, Catholic healthcare provider Mercy Health selected Workday Human Capital Management to improve job candidate experiences, enable employee engagement and seamlessly add new people and locations. In addition, aged care provider Anglicare has used Workday Adaptive Planning to enable its finance managers and analysts to move from spending 80% of their time constructing or representing data to spending the same percentage of time on valuable analysis activities. The solution also enabled Anglicare to create detailed what-if scenarios that allowed its finance team to create parameter-driven forecast sheets for each business unit.
In the United States, St Luke’s University Healthcare improved nurse retention by 50% and developed three workforce apps in eight months with Workday, while John Muir Health saved USD$650,000 annually by reducing accounting FTEs, building the financial sustainability of care delivery.
For healthcare leaders looking to address their people and financial challenges, cloud-based platforms and applications such as those provided by Workday present a dynamic, highly functional and intuitive option. They offer healthcare organisations a compelling opportunity to proactively address the raft of challenges faced by the sector and set the course for a bright future.
