Celebrating Healthcare Innovation Award Winners

In this article, we discuss:

• Collaboration Champion Award: Banner Health
• Digital Transformation Award: Summit Health
• Process Innovation Award: The University of Kansas Health System
• Trailblazer Award: Sharp HealthCare
• Building Community—and Transformation

At Workday, we value our growing and inspiring healthcare community. Our healthcare customers collaborate, innovate, and share best practices with each other to move the healthcare industry forward, improve care quality, and better drive efficiency.

To celebrate our healthcare community’s achievements, we’re delighted to share and celebrate the 2022 winners of the Workday Healthcare Innovation Awards. These awards honor customers who continuously cultivate improvements across their organizations, support and empower their peers, and advance the industry.

“Our healthcare customers’ commitment to collaboration amazes us—and we want to recognize that,” says Keith Lohkamp, senior director of healthcare industry strategy at Workday. “Our winners are not only helping their own organizations increase agility and resilience, they’re also engaging with others to enable industrywide transformation.” 

Without further ado, here are the stories behind our most recent Workday Healthcare Innovation Award winners.

Collaboration Champion Award: Banner Health

Banner Health, a Phoenix-based integrated health system, employs 52,000 team members who provide care to patients across six states. After going live with Workday Human Capital Management (HCM) in August 2020, Banner Health quickly became a major contributor to our Workday Community user and design groups—sharing solutions and promoting the exchange of ideas.

“One of the key drivers behind our decision to use Workday was gaining access to the Workday Community internal forums,” says Janice Gil, Banner’s human resources (HR) technology product owner. “We wanted to learn from others while also being a voice for other healthcare customers.”

Gil attributes Banner’s Workday deployment success to the creation of stakeholder groups that continually gather feedback about Workday from end users. Senior leaders prioritize the work across business functions, while functional teams meet regularly with Banner’s HR technology team to ensure that overall business priorities align with the HR team’s daily tasks.

Banner’s HR Champions Group brings together cross-functional team members, from recruiters to compensation analysts, to demonstrate Workday capabilities and solicit user feedback. The group also has a team that provides user support and ensures the internal Workday team engages effectively with users. 

“This approach ensures we’re deploying what’s important and gives us an opportunity to hear what we can do to make team members’ lives easier,” Gil says. “We don’t want to be the ones driving the technology. We want to deliver the technology to them.”

And as Banner expands its Workday capabilities by deploying VNDLY, a Workday company, and Workday People Analytics, it continues to take an active role in sharing its learnings with other Workday customers.

“Winning the 2022 Collaboration Champion Award is meaningful because we’ve worked hard to increase our presence in the Workday Community,” Gil says. “Being a part of the design partner groups and the early adopter programs has been exciting. We’re grateful to have our work recognized, and we’re grateful for the help other Workday Community members have given to us, too.” 

Digital Transformation Award: Summit Health

Summit Health, a New Jersey-based health system, was formed in 2019 by the merger of Summit Medical Group, a multispecialty practice, and CityMD, one of the largest urgent-care providers in the New York metro area. And in 2022, WestMed Medical Group, a premier integrated network of urgent, primary, and specialty care, joined Summit Health through acquisition. Today, Summit Health employs more than 13,000 employees and 2,800 clinicians who care for patients across 370 locations.

Prior to the merger, Summit Health and WestMed were both Workday customers, using a full suite of solutions, including Workday Financial Management, Workday HCM, Workday Supply Chain Management, and more. Afterward, the combined company expanded its relationship with Workday to further digitally transform operations to support additional acquisitions. By moving the full, newly formed organization under a unified Workday umbrella, Summit Health’s plan for improved efficiency worked and has allowed it, in the last 12 months, to complete four acquisitions and integrate more than 2,000 team members in 150 locations. 

“The Workday platform has enabled us to be successful in M&A,” says Ryan Humphris, vice president of enterprise resource planning applications at Summit Health.

Workday also helped when a time-sensitive problem threatened to derail some of those acquisition integrations. Shortly before WestMed joined Summit to go live on the unified organization’s shared Workday tenant, Summit experienced an unexpected and extended outage with their previous time tracking provider. The Summit team urgently needed to find a reliable solution to keep the integration on track. They selected Workday Time and Attendance as a replacement and—thanks to WestMed’s prior knowledge and satisfaction with the product—deployed the system in less than six weeks, which was the fastest time tracking deployment in Workday history.

“Confidence can be a challenge, especially when you’re the first one to go down a path,” Humphris says. Fortunately, “our executives trusted us wholeheartedly, and Workday offered critical support by saying, ‘You can actually do this, and we’ll help along the way.’”

Summit succeeded in not only rolling out Workday Time and Attendance remarkably quickly, but also in integrating 2,000 new employees to Workday. 

“Some people may view Workday as a back-office application, but a system that ensures every employee gets paid on time and can view their compensation details in real time goes beyond back office,” Humphris says. “We continue to push the boundaries of the Workday platform.” 

Process Innovation Award: The University of Kansas Health System

Like all healthcare providers, The University of Kansas Health System needs to ensure its clinicians—including nurses, pharmacists, and others—maintain licensure, so it can continue to be accredited by The Joint Commission, the regulatory body that oversees healthcare provider and program certification. 

The Kansas City-based health system, which employs over 14,000 employees and 1,000 physicians across more than 100 locations, decided to implement a self-service approach to maintaining its licensure records using Workday HCM. With The Joint Commission’s visit approaching, the stakes were high. Tammy Shepherd, the University of Kansas Health System’s director of enterprise resource planning, moved fast. 

“We created custom reports, so managers could monitor their peoples’ compliance with licensure requirements, and we created a certification partner role within Workday, so a chosen person in each department could manage the whole process,” Shepherd says.

In addition to training for managers and certification partners, the health system also offers a monthly refresher session for team members with an upcoming license renewal, plus step-by-step instruction sheets and customized email alerts with information about renewal. This move has created a major culture change that’s resulted in greater empowerment for team members and dramatically increased organizational efficiency. 

Due to this technology investment, going forward The University of Kansas Health System's 5,000 nurses won’t need to manually update their licenses—instead, they’ll automatically update through Workday.

“Innovation tends to come from a pain point,” Shepherd says. “When people bubble up dissatisfaction, we discuss it in a steering committee with leaders from HR, finance, supply chain, and tech. We then identify a task force that can identify the root causes and find solutions.” 

Trailblazer Award: Sharp HealthCare

Located in San Diego, Sharp HealthCare is an integrated not-for-profit healthcare delivery network that includes four acute care hospitals, three specialty hospitals, three affiliated medical groups, and a health plan.

Sharp went live with Workday Financial Management, Workday HCM, and Workday Supply Chain Management for Healthcare in January 2022. In doing so, it became the first healthcare customer to use Workday Accounting Center—a move that eliminated many hours of manual work.

“With our legacy system, we were unable to bring in detailed information, so we used spreadsheets and tools outside of the general ledger to manipulate and analyze financial data,” says Holly Landowski, vice president of information services at Sharp. “With Workday Accounting Center, the calculations and journal entries happen automatically, saving days of work each month and providing real-time information to everyone who needs it.”

Additionally, Sharp leaders leveraged Workday Extend to customize solutions. For example, the team created a Workday tool that provides an easy way for employees to give back to the community—whether through a single donation, a recurring donation, or a donation of paid time off. When they needed to make last-minute changes to an in-person event, the organization was able to use Workday Extend to easily register employees for virtual sessions—even using a register by proxy option for managers and senior leadership that was built right into the application. 

As a result, “We’ve got happy accounting and finance folks, happy leaders and executives, and happy folks at the hospitals,” Landowski says.

Building Community—and Transformation

Through advisory councils, design partner groups, and special interest groups, Workday is committed to helping our healthcare customers share best practices, try new solutions, and ultimately drive innovation.

“Collaboration is critical in healthcare, so our goal is to create the best way for the healthcare community to connect,” says Dale Smythe, regional vice president of sales for the healthcare industry at Workday. “We work to understand the needs of healthcare organizations and deliver solutions across the industry to add value, improve efficiency, lower costs, and enable better decision-making.” 

Congratulations to the winners, and thank you to all our healthcare customers for your continued commitment to the Workday community.