Advocate Health, the third-largest not-for-profit healthcare organisation in the U.S., serves patients across 6 states with over 60 hospitals and 1,000 sites of care. Like many healthcare systems, Advocate Health faces the challenge of managing a large contingent workforce to address staffing needs and ensure high-quality patient care.
Coordinated contingent workforce management
Formed through the merger of Advocate Aurora and Atrium Health, Advocate Health inherited a complex and decentralised contingent workforce programme. Each legacy organisation had different systems, processes and contract terms, resulting in administrative challenges, inconsistencies and limited visibility into workforce data. This lack of standardisation led to inefficiencies and increased risk, and hindered Advocate Health’s ability to scale effectively. “Our technology was different across our regions,” said Gary Weller, director of Contingent Labour. “In one region, we had very poor technology. In the other region, we had none. And that didn’t allow us to grow, scale or manage the contingent workforce the way we needed to.”
Workday VNDLY eliminates friction in the contingent worker hiring process by providing transparency from end to end.
Director of Contingent Labour
An agile approach to staffing
To facilitate post-merger growth, Advocate Health deployed the Workday VNDLY cloud-based vendor management system (VMS) to streamline, standardise and scale its contingent workforce management. This unified VMS provides a single platform for managing the entire contingent workforce lifecycle, from sourcing and hiring to onboarding and offboarding, enabling rapid and efficient expansion.
Elevating efficiency and resource optimisation
By streamlining the hiring process and improving onboarding efficiency, Advocate Health has decreased its time-to-fill from 9 days to fewer than 5. This lets Advocate Health quickly onboard talent to maintain optimal patient care. “Workday VNDLY eliminates friction in the hiring process,” says Weller.
Advocate Health has also saved over $100 million through a proactive labour rate strategy and improved visibility into contingent workforce spend. Workday VNDLY enables Advocate Health to centralise its programme, enforce rate agreements, better manage vendor contracts and optimise the workforce mix. Additionally, Workday VNDLY supports Advocate Health’s compliance efforts with various regulations and requirements such as tenure policy management, tax rate management, onboarding checklists and more.
With Workday VNDLY, I can deliver critical data to our leaders across all of our labour categories and provide a seamless hiring process, which ultimately drives the best patient care.
Director of Contingent Labour
The power of seamless connectivity for healthcare
The connectivity between Workday VNDLY and Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) is essential to Advocate Health’s success. Real-time data flowing between the two systems supports the data’s accuracy and consistency, eliminating the need for manual updates. “The Workday HCM connector with Workday VNDLY provides live updates for all of our most critical foundational data,” says Weller. This also powers Advocate Health’s reporting capabilities with insights into workforce data for better decision-making.
A foundation for future growth in healthcare
With Workday, Advocate Health is more efficient and compliant. Weller adds, “With Workday, I can deliver critical data to our leaders across all of our labour categories and provide a seamless hiring process, which ultimately drives the best patient care.”