Prospect Medical Holdings Elevates Patient Care With Oracle Cloud
After rapid growth through acquisitions, Prospect Medical Holdings migrated to Oracle Cloud applications to centralize operations and lower patient care costs.
Business Challenges
With $2.7 billion in annual revenue, the company, which operates 17 hospitals and 165 medical care clinics across 5 states, was one of the first healthcare organizations to adopt a formal operating model. That model spells out the company’s overarching goal: to contribute to healthcare reform by lowering the cost of patient care while enhancing the quality.
But aging computer systems, cobbled together after a wave of acquisitions, got in the way of modernization. “It’s very difficult, when you have 34 different human resource and payroll systems, to try to implement commonality across the organization,” says Cindra Syverson, Chief HR Officer.
The company began its IT transformation by migrating to a single Oracle Cloud platform that incorporates connected applications to handle supply chain management, human capital management, and enterprise resource planning.
The transformation came not a moment too soon for Prospect Medical Holdings, which was about to be challenged by a crisis unlike any other: the global pandemic.
"The challenge with acquisitions is assimilating other companies’ cultures, inheriting the systems and processes that are already in place, then having to adopt or transition them to a new system," says Wayne Allen, Vice President, Integration and Operations Improvement, Business Leader Prospect Medical Holdings Oracle Implementation. "Oracle has been transformational, helping us sunset legacy systems and building products and processes to become a unified healthcare system."
Why Prospect Medical Holdings Chose Oracle
After considering IT offerings from several vendors, Prospect Medical Holdings chose an interconnected Oracle suite of applications because of Oracle’s demonstrated leadership in cloud computing; its ability to integrate several systems into a single platform, tie the healthcare provider’s back-office systems together to automate processes like reporting, and consolidate administrative functions to save time and money. “We all felt like Oracle was going to take us into the future,” says Syverson.
Results
Prospect Medical Holdings began its IT transformation by implementing Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM, allowing HR leaders instant access to employee records for the first time.
“I finally have at my fingertips access to all 17,000 employees, which were previously on 34 different systems,” says Syverson. “The Prospect HR team can now easily complete their HR dashboards/Metrics with raw data directly from the system.”
By adding Oracle Fusion Cloud SCM, Prospect Medical Holdings was ready to face the daunting supply chain requirements brought on by the pandemic. The healthcare group kept its patient care experts who were on the front lines well-equipped with the personal protective equipment necessary to protect them from the virus. The effort involved finding and acquiring medical supplies the company doesn’t ordinarily order, all while cutting expenses to conserve funds for the unknown requirements of the pandemic.
“To get the PPE we needed and make sure we took care of our patients in extraordinary circumstances, we had to slow down some internal initiatives, extend deadlines, shuffle priorities. Otherwise, the financial pressures would have been way too much,” says Hassan Sharif, chief information officer.
After adding Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, the company standardized names and acquisition costs for medical supplies and devices used across the healthcare centers. That seemingly basic change actually is the start of a significant effort to reduce costs, says Wayne Allen, vice president of integration and operations improvement.
"I have to approve invoices, and having them show up in my email and being able to open them and approve them in a matter of minutes is dramatically different," says Allen. "Before, someone had to scan a paper invoice, send it to someone to print, sign it, then scan it and send it back, hoping it arrived on time. The ability to review and approve it all electronically, so quickly, has dramatically improved our supply chain."