With roots dating back to Omaha’s first hospital, Nebraska Medicine is the culmination of 150 years of quality healthcare in the Cornhusker State. Breakthroughs in cancer care and organ transplants and a reputation as one of the nation’s top maternal health centers are just a few of many reasons why the American Hospital Association named it the fifth most trusted health system in the country.
So when talent shortages, rising labor costs, and supply chain disruptions challenged the industry, Nebraska Medicine leaders sought to revamp how they operate as part of their commitment to providing exceptional patient care.
Getting more nurses on the floor faster.
Growing its staff while giving current employees the support they needed to succeed were top priorities for Nebraska Medicine. Leaders leveraged Workday Human Capital Management to meet both goals. “We lowered nurse onboarding time for transfers by 75 percent and for new hires by half,” says Donna Weis, director of information systems at Nebraska Medicine. By getting additional nurses on the floor faster, leaders could reduce workloads and lessen the need for overtime—resulting in cost savings and decreased burnout.
The HR team has also introduced stay interviews for frontline employees within Workday to help prevent turnover. One senior HRIS analyst recalls, “Before Workday, stay interviews and succession planning happened manually in Excel. It took weeks to build and there was no confidence in the accuracy of the data.” Now, expanded insights aid with retention and improved processes around succession planning offer increased agility.
And mobile functionality delivers secure anytime, anywhere access to enterprise applications. The decreased time spent on administrative tasks enabled clinicians to focus on the patient experience.
“The mobile app has been a game changer for human resources and a huge hit with nurses,” says Weis. “Nurses can now make approvals or requests on the go and spend more time delivering care.”
Better onboarding lets us get new hires on the job sooner, which decreases workloads on the hospital floor.
Director of Information Systems
Deeper people insights and better-informed decisions.
Leaders also knew they had to address Nebraska Medicine's IT infrastructure, which had become increasingly disjointed. “Our old system required IT staff to maintain processes outside their normal job duties,” says James Baldus, systems lead. “They spent hours studying the specifics of other departments so they could knowledgeably adjust and coordinate systems. Now, all that is done automatically.”
With a focus on automating processes, Nebraska Medicine had increased integrations by 45 percent by the time they went live on Workday. What was previously a patchwork of processes that required custom connections and manual interventions is now a unified system where integrations continue to drive automation.
Nebraska Medicine uses Workday reporting to access real-time data on Workday dashboards. Flexible and configurable, it allows HR to generate more than 1,500 custom reports that automatically blend information from multiple sources in an easy, reliable way. Company leaders can quickly access a wide array of data from one unified system.
“Our leadership team now gets the information they need the moment they need it,” says Brian Jefferis, supervisor of people analytics. “This saves time and helps us make more informed HR decisions.”
Healthier financial planning.
Baldus says budgets and financial reports had also lacked real-time data and were distributed across multiple spreadsheets. “We needed simplified, coordinated, cross-department planning to better manage budgets and spending,” Baldus says. “Finance, human resources, and procurement now all flow together.”
Nebraska Medicine has already seen a 40 percent increase in the number of dimensions available for financial and management reporting in the core finance system. Preparation time for financial statements for each department decreased by 75 percent as the need for manual inputs dropped.
Using Workday also streamlined business processes that cross multiple departments. Nebraska Medicine soon saw delivery time for customer invoices decrease by 50 percent and accounts receivable billing inaccuracies drop from 5 percent to 1 percent. As a result, reimbursement shortfalls have decreased, meaning cash flow is more timely and consistent.
Previously, Nebraska Medicine's systems upgrades and updates were expensive, manual processes that drained budgets and pulled IT groups away from core duties. After the switch, these tasks were automated—enabling staff to redirect efforts and produce an annual cost savings of $100,000.”
We manage all licensures and certifications in Workday, so it’s easy to make sure each nurse is up to date—that’s a big win for us.
Systems Lead
More time for the mission.
With realigned processes, Nebraska Medicine has more reliable people-related metrics and analytics across the organization. From the human resources department to clinicians and leaders, data is transparent and streamlined, giving staff more time to focus on providing premier university-level education, innovative research, and extraordinary patient care to its community.
Licensures and certifications are now all accessible in one system as well. “We manage all of those in Workday, so it's easy to make sure each nurse is up to date—it’s been a big win for us,” Baldus says.
As a result of those improvements, clinicians and support staff are more engaged, Weis says. “A big goal of moving to Workday was having a modern, integrated platform so we could refocus our energies on providing the best patient care possible, and now we have that.”
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