Workday Global Study: Healthcare Leaders Recognize Urgent Need to Accelerate Digital Strategy

In this article, we discuss:

• Strong Headwinds Challenge Transformation Efforts in Healthcare
• Managing Turbulence While Building a Healthier Future

Digital transformation has dramatically accelerated in the healthcare industry in recent years. This progress, particularly around access to telemedicine, was built on momentum created over the past decade, as federal incentives drove U.S. healthcare providers to invest billions of dollars to improve IT infrastructure and adopt electronic health records. These advancements have transformed care delivery and hospital operations. Healthcare leaders now have the opportunity to focus more on better supporting their staffing efforts, using scenario planning to prepare for future uncertainty, and better leveraging data to inform decision making—all of which can be achieved with continuous digital transformation efforts.

Workday research reveals a major—and widening—divide between many providers’ digital goals and their ability to reach them. “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation,” a Workday global survey of 1,150 senior executives, found that 73% of healthcare leaders believe their digital strategy is always or often outpaced by the demands of the business, and 54% acknowledge a widening gap between where the business is and where it needs to be.

Strong Headwinds Challenge Transformation Efforts in Healthcare

As frustration with chronic staffing shortages drive even more skilled healthcare professionals to leave the field, it’s no wonder that so many healthcare leaders identify workforce skills as the biggest barrier to transformation. Unfortunately, a whopping 79% of industry executives say that their organizations have made no or limited progress in deploying technology to augment the capacity of existing workers.

This misalignment is particularly worrisome in the face of growing industry headwinds. McKinsey & Co. expects that healthcare expenditure growth could exceed economic growth by nearly 6% in 2023, spurred by high inflation and persistent staff shortages. As healthcare leaders manage a growing list of concerns including staff burnout, narrowing margins, and an ongoing affordability crisis, the ability for hospitals and health systems to provide high quality care across clinical specialties is at risk. And, real relief is not in sight. Organizations will continue to need to do more with less. 

Of course, executives may be tempted to pull back on technology spending in the face of financial challenges. But the reality is that digital transformation is no longer a “nice to have” that can be temporarily shelved. Rather, it’s an urgent imperative that’s necessary to create new ways of working and ensure high-quality healthcare delivery into the future.

Consider: Today, a majority of healthcare leaders say their IT services are sometimes able to keep up with their business demands, but sometimes fall into triage mode. This reality will only get worse the longer investment is delayed. Moreover, as financial pressures grow, the need to streamline administrative costs through automated systems also increases.

Managing transformation will also be increasingly important as the healthcare industry continues to see high levels of M&A activity in 2023. As organizations seek stronger futures through strategic partnerships, they’ll need to avoid painful integration hiccups to retain team members and begin delivering on their promises.

Managing Turbulence While Building a Healthier Future

Even as they face many competing pressures, healthcare leaders understand that digital transformation is the foundation that underpins improved operations, a prepared workforce, and a better patient experience. They know that creating accessible and usable data is key to driving an agile culture, and they recognize the opportunities in front of them.

Specifically, healthcare leaders acknowledge that they must enable sophisticated scenario planning throughout their organizations. In fact, 36% of leaders identified scenario planning as the single most important business capability, followed by 31% who chose experimenting with new operating models and revenue streams, the Workday survey found.

This priority is understandable, as the constantly evolving demands in healthcare underscore the need to scenario-plan across a growing range of healthcare issues, from Medicare and Medicaid regulation changes to staffing levels to telehealth reimbursement to supply chain management.

As healthcare leaders must continually recalibrate, they understand that making decisions becomes far easier when they can see the big picture clearly. As such, they’re prioritizing technology that integrates financial, people, and operational data to create a single source of truth with real-time, actionable, cross-functional information.

Better operationalizing their data is part of a high-level focus on efficiency. Healthcare leaders say they’re putting more investment toward intelligent technologies to augment workforce performance, increasing the efficiency of their organizations’ planning and analysis, and driving faster employee acquisition and deployment.

Take, for example, the University of Kansas Health System. Like many organizations in the highly regulated healthcare world, the system was swamped by administrative work, including the need to ensure that its clinical workers stayed up to date on licensing requirements. But while record maintenance may be tedious, the stakes are incredibly high: If a hospital’s doctors, nurses, and pharmacists fail to maintain their licenses, the organization can lose its accreditation and suspend operations.

By implementing a self-service approach through Workday, University of Kansas improved license renewal efficiency while dramatically eliminating repetitive, low-value HR tasks. What’s more, the move also introduced a sweeping culture change that empowered team members to take ownership.

Similarly, Northeast Georgia Health saw dramatic results when it decided to replace its legacy ERP system. CIO Chris Paravate explains “Workday is integral to our digital transformation strategy, helping us to leverage cloud capabilities and interoperability, and apply evidence medicine in a way we haven't in the past.”

With Workday, the organization transformed its HR, finance, and supply chain operations and boosted organizational transparency, efficiency, and analysis—strengths that position them well for future success.

“We need platforms that are as dynamic as the healthcare industry is going to be, and Workday tools are the foundation of all that: the cost accounting aspect, the supply chain, the resources to deliver that care,” Paravate continues. 

Rather than bemoan the difficulties ahead, healthcare leaders seem eager to take a lesson from their peers using Workday and embrace change.

Read the full research report:  “Closing the Acceleration Gap: Toward Sustainable Digital Transformation,