Minnesota healthcare provider uses Oracle Fusion AI Data Platform to help find and develop its talent
CentraCare has roots going back to 1886, when St. Cloud Hospital was built by the Sisters of the Order of St. Benedict to serve the healthcare needs of people living in central Minnesota. In 1995, CentraCare was formed and has become one of the largest health systems in Minnesota, with the original St. Cloud Hospital – now a comprehensive regional medical center – and eight others throughout the state. In addition, they have more than 30 clinics, 160 outreach locations, and the newly opened CentraCare Regional Campus St. Cloud, one of three campuses of University of Minnesota Medical School, offering a unique focus on rural healthcare training.
After the COVID pandemic – pressure to find staff
In 2022, as the nation emerged from the COVID pandemic, CentraCare was in something of a crisis, like many other healthcare organizations. Regina Duval, Director Analytics and Data Governance, explained, “Turnover and vacancy rates increased significantly, creating real staffing challenges across the organization. This period also highlighted the growing importance of leaders balancing patient care priorities with a stronger focus on employee experience and support.” Tonya Larson, Senior Director of HR Operations, expanded on this point: “Clinical leaders were now being asked to do something new and unfamiliar. They are amazing clinicians – nurses, therapists, doctors, surgeons, or whatever specialty they’re in – comfortable analyzing patient data coming from the Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system because it pertains to their area of expertise. They know what a healthy person should look like, or a good medical benchmark. But they often lack clarity on how analyzing HR data can inform their management style, or how a particular financial measure can indicate whether a department or division is economically healthy.”
All information at leaders’ fingertips
There is a natural tension. Clinicians observing pressure on headcount or budgets, were immediately concerned about the impact on patients. Visualizing data helped them see things objectively: Here’s the human capital cost of your department. This is what it costs to run your department. You either need to increase your revenue – treat more patients – or adjust the human capital. But managing a workforce is not just about headcount. It’s about being able to benchmark on a whole range of HR metrics – salary, skills, experience, performance grades, engagement, and more. Making it easier to visualize that balance helps leaders recognize that having the right staffing with the right skills and positive engagement actually improves patient outcomes.
From clinical data analysis to HR and finance data analysis
CentraCare needed to simplify the delivery of analytics from Oracle Fusion Applications, to help leaders to become as savvy with HR and ERP data as they were with clinical data. They chose Fusion AI Data Platform (FAIDP, formerly known as Oracle Fusion Data Intelligence), a family of prebuilt, cloud native analytic applications for Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications. It provides AI-driven prebuilt insights, including best-practice key metrics and deep analyses, to help unify information and improve decision-making, empowering business users throughout the organization.
FAIPD’s ability to drill from high level summarized data right down to the detail is a key part of making things easier for managers. Filtering on the time dimension is particularly important. Users had no patience for anything that is limited to a specific timeframe, so Duval’s team always adds a relative time filter to dashboards and lets users control it themselves.
Duval explained, “With FAIDP, with all the curated data, intelligent workbook design and using filters, we can give clinical leaders everything needed for all their people metrics together in one place: diversity, turnover rates, vacancy, talent, etc. It’s a huge selling point for them.” This contrasted with Power BI, which they also use. “In Power BI we could not do that. It would break things,” she said.
Focus on developing talent
Having reduced headcount significantly following the pandemic, the focus is on developing talent. Larson explains, “We’re investing in talent management. Developing talent, selecting talent, succession planning, creating talent profiles, using all the employee data we have in Fusion Applications. We’re starting to show our people leaders how to leverage Oracle, versus keeping all those notes in OneNote. Each manager, following employee ‘check-ins’ has page after page of conversations in a OneNote file. They have to resurface them at the end of the year when they’re doing performance reviews. We’re trying to get people to keep the data in Oracle, so they can leverage AI to help make a synopsis of what happened during the year.”
Getting the right mix of talent
Another area where FAIDP can help CentraCare is in patient diversity. Larson thinks about it this way: “What does the patient demographic information of our patient populations across all our sites look like – sex, gender, age, race – and how does it compare with our people who are looking after those patients? Are we representative of the communities we serve? How does it vary, say, in our rural locations, which oftentimes have a more geriatric population? Also, reimbursement rates from a Medicare perspective, and some of the acuity of care that we must provide because of where we’re located geographically – FAIDP can help us visualize all that data.”
CentraCare recently acquired new locations and has taken on new staff. Part of HR’s job is to assure equity for pay and conditions for staff across all facilities. To manage the necessary adjustments, FAIDP can help identify disparities and analyze impact on staff so adjustments can be made fairly over time.
Finance switching away from spreadsheets
At the same time as Duval and her team were implementing Fusion HCM Analytics, they were also implementing Fusion ERP Analytics. It proved extremely popular with users, particularly in Accounts Payable. Duval said, “We’re excited to see that, without any push from us our accounts payable staff are finding value, just using the out-of-the-box content. “Our CFO is excited about the opportunity and is exploring ways to further strengthen the team’s technology skills. Many team members rely on spreadsheets today, and we’re demonstrating how the same information is available in FAIDP in a way that’s more accurate, reliable, easier to use — more visual.”
Leaders adopt analytics
Adoption across CentraCare has been organic and largely driven by the users themselves. Duval explained that they’re “finding the pockets that already have a little excitement and curiosity to learn from their data, and a business need. We help them really become champions in using FAIDP, so they can drill further, and build their own visualizations on data that matter to them.”
Larson added that, “compared to a year or so ago, we now have more people requesting access to different reports or wanting to be able to see different views on the data.”
Blending patient data with HR data
CentraCare is enthusiastic about future benefits from blending Oracle Fusion data with patient data from Epic EMR. “It’s going to take us some time to get this designed and developed,” Larson explained, “but we’re looking forward to having all the integrated reporting, being able to see it all in one place, versus having analytics professionals take patient survey data from Press Ganey, data from Oracle Fusion, marry it with whatever is happening on the patient side, put them together and then say ‘this is what your patient population looks like’. When we’ve finished, we will be blending data from just two systems instead of many more. Within FAIDP, we’ll be able to visualize correlations between patient experience scores and employee engagement scores, for example. That’s exciting.”
Learn More
For more information, visit CentraCare’s website and ask questions in the Oracle Analytics Community.