Today’s healthcare organizations must navigate a complicated landscape. From managing a limited workforce to planning around resource and supply shortages to maneuvering through the changing requirements of patient care, the industry is facing more challenges than ever before. Running a successful healthcare organization in this constantly changing climate requires a level of organizational flexibility across the entire ecosystem that has never been more crucial—or more difficult to attain.

As pressures increase on the healthcare workforce, organizations need tools that support the evolving workplace, that better leverage employee skill sets, and that fill evolving needs. A session at Oracle CloudWorld took a detailed look at some of these challenges across the healthcare ecosystem and how Oracle’s comprehensive offerings in Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications Suite are uniquely positioned to address them.

Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications such as Human Capital Management (HCM) and Supply Chain Management (SCM) work seamlessly together to provide insights that help organizations better support HR, navigate supply chain complexities, and improve patient care. These solutions work together to provide

• Demand planning so organizations can leverage skills across the enterprise for improved business agility
• An enhanced employee experience so healthcare workers can focus on patient care
• Intelligent supply chain management solutions to reduce manual tasks and improve patient safety

By helping healthcare organizations address their core challenges, Fusion Cloud Applications allow them to future-proof their business while creating better outcomes for their patients, staff and their entire ecosystem.

Demand planning: Getting the right people in the right place at the right time

Providing better patient care starts with improving demand planning, but that’s easier said than done. It begins when healthcare organizations thoroughly understand their employees’ skills—from clinicians to administrative staff. Demand in healthcare is changing so quickly that organizations can no longer assess skill sets and optimize the workforce on an annual basis. Matching available employee skills to departmental needs should be included in every scheduling cycle.   

Such a level of change can easily seem overwhelming without a comprehensive tool such as Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM. This complete cloud solution allows healthcare organizations to identify and leverage employees’ skills today and helps them better position those skills for the future. Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM’s Team Skills Center, for example, provides managers with a centralized location for an always-current view of the skills of their organization, where they can quickly identify organizational risks by skill and individual, and take action to close the gaps.

Oracle Strategic Workforce Planning brings together HCM and Oracle Cloud Enterprise Performance Management (EPM) to give healthcare leaders the analytical capabilities to perform “what if” scenario planning, along with the modeling they need to make better decisions and close skill gaps. For example, the solution can help an organization determine if it can fill needs with internal transfers, if it has resources that can be shared, or if it needs to hire additional employees. With tools that span HCM and EPM, organizations can manage employee productivity while working toward financial agility.

Employee experience: Empowering workers wherever they are in their journey

Healthcare workers want to do their jobs efficiently and effectively. To support them, healthcare organizations need to facilitate streamlined working methods with unified, integrated cloud solutions such as Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. For instance, Oracle Journeys, powered by Fusion Cloud HCM, makes it easy for employees to find and complete actions for their work with personalized, contextual guidance.

Employees thrive when given the opportunity to grow and connect in a personalized way, such as through an empowering employee experience platform like Oracle ME. By enhancing the overall workplace experience, organizations can improve employee engagement, retention, and productivity. And for technical support or timely HR-related services, Oracle HR Help Desk delivers answers and proactive support while ensuring adherence to data privacy practices. In addition, Oracle Digital Assistant delivers the quick, consistent, automated, and intelligent support that healthcare employees need—available around the clock.

Supply chain: Navigating supply issues to improve patient safety

Patient safety is at the heart of providing quality care, and access to the correct supplies is critical to achieving positive patient outcomes. The healthcare supply chain faces a number of challenges, including complex pricing and the pervasive involvement of group purchasing organizations (GPOs) in the negotiation of contracts and distribution rates. Adding to the complexity, these organizations must also navigate product recalls, deal with increasing supply disruptions, and determine appropriate item substitutions.

Many healthcare organizations struggle with manual processes in all of these areas—and inefficient processes can negatively impact care, even putting lives at stake. Healthcare organizations must be able to quickly identify what supplies are available and route them appropriately. Oracle addresses all of these healthcare supply chain challenges with applications that streamline healthcare analytics, supplier rebates, replenishment planning, contract pricing, and more.

For example, the Product Recall Management solution within Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM collects data on recalled products quickly and identifies where affected goods are within the healthcare organization’s inventory. The solution can even identify purchases made by clinical areas such as the operating room or cath lab. Recall Management also creates a series of tasks that can be managed until the issue is resolved, so employees have complete confidence that patient risk is mitigated while prioritizing safety. Additionally, Fusion Cloud SCM offers an Item Substitution solution, which uses automation and smart intelligence to automatically replace items with known substitutes, making the management of suppy disruptions faster and more manageable.

Meeting the needs of the evolving healthcare organization

Fusion Applications work smoothly together to help healthcare organizations make more informed decisions—and they offer a complete solution natively built for the cloud. By improving and connecting the employee experience across the enterprise, Oracle HCM enables a single source of truth for healthcare organizations’ HR and finance functions. And Oracle SCM helps healthcare organizations respond quickly to changing demand, supply, and market conditions.

Fusion Applications have specific healthcare analytics pre-built into the platforms to connect people from across the organization for business decisions that improve patient outcomes. With Oracle Cloud HCM and SCM , employees’ skills are leveraged across the enterprise, allowing them to excel in their roles, better manage and stock supplies, and ultimately better serve patients’ needs—now and in the future.