Mark Hite
, August 31, 2023
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Contract labor costs for hospitals have increased dramatically - more than 258% - from 2019 to 2022, negatively affecting the bottom line for healthcare systems that are dealing with unique care delivery for patients and consumerism in the market. Organizations continue to encounter rising costs and staff shortages; while healthcare has topped the list of job cuts recently, there is an increase in hiring. The result is a fluctuation in staff and the critical skills needed to provide quality care to patients.  

These trends, then, create a need and an opportunity for healthcare companies to integrate planning and budgeting solutions with human capital and payroll systems to provide clear insight using actual data that drives more efficient and accurate decisions. This is achieved using a strategic workforce strategy, and there are three key pillars that work together to accomplish this.

  • Oracle Human Capital Management
  • Healthcare Operational Planning
  • Strategic Workforce Planning

Oracle Human Capital Management

  • Leverage Recruitment & Retention capabilities for your team members and ability to grow your organization and services.
  • Use Oracle Journeys for a unique experience for your employees.
  • Benefit from Oracle Learning so your staff continues to grow and gather the required skills and credentials.

Healthcare Operational Planning – a unique Alithya solution using Oracle EPM Cloud

  • Leverage proven Workforce Planning capability setup that is configured to support both hospital and provider planning needs.
  • Detailed alignment between payroll and planning for both hours and dollars to baseline the WFP plan at desired planning levels.  
  • Hybrid planning methods for both job code and employee planning
  • Driver-based planning by job code to allow volume-based flexing of staff and show staff demands and the financial impact.

Strategic Workforce Planning

  • Validate that you have the appropriate staff in each department to support the organization’s plan.
  • Link your HCM investment to your Strategic Workforce Plan so decision-makers can have visibility into essential employee-based attributes such as skills, competencies, job experience, costs, and performance as well as organizational-based attributes such as age bands, gender mix and attrition/retirement when preparing financial and strategic plans.  
  • Assess and align your workforce planning with your demand drivers and financial budgets and ensure that your resources have the right skills to support the direction of the organization, especially if the company is looking to add additional service line capabilities.
  • Analyze the most critical roles in the organization to ensure they are the focus of retention efforts to reduce recruitment for these roles.

Following this blog post to introduce the key pillars of a strategic workforce strategy for healthcare companies is a three-part blog series to expand on each pillar and help you evaluate your current workforce strategy. This series also shares information about the tools that can help drive more efficient and accurate decisions to provide quality care to patients. The next post in the series focuses on leveraging Oracle Human Capital Management to support your greatest asset - your people.

For comments, questions, or suggestions for future topics, please reach out to us at infosolutions@alithya.com. Visit our blog regularly for new posts about Cloud updates and other Oracle Cloud Services such as Planning and Budgeting, Financial Consolidation, Account Reconciliation, and Enterprise Data Management.  Follow Alithya on social media for the latest information about EPM, ERP, and Analytics solutions to meet your business needs. 

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