John Kravitz, vice president and head of healthcare at Workday, spoke with Bob Evans of Acceleration Economy about how powerful new technologies—including AI and machine learning (ML)—can provide healthcare customers with better outcomes.
This article, written by Kieron Allen, analyst at Acceleration Economy and edited by Workday Staff Writers, is republished with permission.
Healthcare providers are under increasing pressure to modernize their data and tech infrastructure. Faced with stringent patient privacy regulations, complex workforce needs, and growing expectations around patient-centered care, healthcare leaders need to move away from slow and outdated systems.
The good news: cloud applications are transforming healthcare organizations. The cloud is helping organizations accelerate the standard of patient care and optimize operations across finance, human resources, planning, and supply chain.
Bob Evans, founder of Cloud Wars, spoke with John Kravitz, vice president and head of healthcare at Workday, about how Workday is a leader in providing transformative technology for healthcare organizations. Kravitz began the conversation by explaining how Workday is using powerful new technologies, including AI and machine learning (ML), to provide customers with better outcomes.
This article contains some of the key points from the conversation with Evans and Kravitz and the corresponding article “How Workday Applies AI and ML Technologies to Healthcare Industry | Workday’s John Kravitz on Innovation Agenda.” Learn more by streaming the full conversation.
“Artificial intelligence and machine learning help fulfill the promise of patient-centered care by learning from past patient records,” said Kravitz. “Already, we have seen AI and ML applied to help with diagnosis, to help with automation, to help guide our care recommendations, and so much more. And, we’re seeing tools like ambient voice, which listens to the clinician, documents the care delivered, places orders, and reviews results with the patient all while taking the clinician’s hand off the keyboard for the most part.”
Kravitz explained how Workday helps providers deliver on the promise of patient-centered care, citing the company’s work on the patient-centered supply chain—providing patient supplies required for surgical procedures in the acute care environment.
“With Workday Supply Chain Management, we see machine learning playing a role that’s really important to get the right supplies for elective surgeries and patients that are in patient-centered medical homes,” said Kravitz. “We don’t want to take people out of the equation. We want to support the work that people do and personalize the experience for each user, ensuring they get in and find what they need, complete the task, and then return to patient care.”
“Already, we have seen AI and ML applied to help with diagnosis, to help with automation, to help guide our care recommendations, and so much more.”
John Kravitz
Vice President and Head of Healthcare
Workday
Kravitz explained how Workday enables healthcare organizations to extract maximum value, with all customers having access to the latest innovations. “We have one version of our software, and we provide updates to that on a semi-annual basis,” said Kravitz. “Listening to customer feedback, we make changes to our system to meet our customers’ business needs. This allows us to provide enhanced functionality to our end users.”
Workday is delivering outcomes that match the needs of healthcare providers by listening to what those needs are and responding accordingly. “The talent shortage seems to be the biggest challenge since the pandemic,” said Kravitz. “People are struggling, salaries have increased because of the competition, people have changed careers and have left healthcare. So healthcare organizations are struggling.”
Ultimately, organizations need an HR process to bring people on quickly. “One of our customers cited a 25% increase in the ability to hire staff,” said Kravitz. “These are really tangible results.” Yet, the talent shortage isn’t the only pain point that Workday addresses. In another example, Kravitz explained how Workday Strategic Sourcing enabled a prominent West Coast healthcare system to save $4.2 million in the first 6 months of using the software.
“With Workday Supply Chain Management, we see AI and ML playing a role that’s really important to get the right supplies for elective surgeries and patients that are in patient-centered medical homes.”
John Kravitz
Vice President and Head of Healthcare
Workday
Workday operates across many different industries and, as such, is familiar with a broad spectrum of challenges. From cybersecurity concerns to compliance requirements, this high-level perspective has enabled Workday to help healthcare companies navigate the complex digital landscape successfully.
Before coming to Workday, Kravitz worked as a healthcare CIO. In that capacity, Kravitz pushed forward with cloud-based solutions in lieu of on-premise development. “At Workday, we have a true enterprise management cloud for healthcare,” said Kravitz. “The foundation of the Workday platform is built on a dynamic, intelligent data core that takes security, privacy, compliance, organizational hierarchy, analytics, and business processes into account.”
The Workday intelligent data core connects all the data that powers specific applications such as Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management (HCM), Workday Supply Chain Management, and Workday Adaptive Planning to support each customer’s business needs. While traditional ERP vendors had to migrate their systems to the cloud, Workday is cloud-native. “All our frameworks were built with the cloud in mind from day one,” said Kravitz. “I think that’s an important factor.”
Kravitz noted the importance of partners and industry expertise in delivering the best healthcare solutions to customers. “Several of our partners offer an industry accelerator for healthcare. We’re working with core partners who are industry leaders that have best practices and industry innovation.”
To learn more on the challenges leaders in healthcare face with digital acceleration initiatives, read our report for three steps to advance acceleration and sustain digital upgrade efforts.
Workday leaders share insights on how AI and ML, supply chain disruption, and cost constraints are impacting healthcare.
Our healthcare customers and KLAS Research have ranked us Best in KLAS in enterprise resource planning (ERP) for Workday Financial Management, Workday Human Capital Management, and Workday Supply Chain Management for Healthcare, and Best in KLAS for Talent Management.
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