Workday Podcast: Accelerating Transformation in Healthcare With Deloitte and Sentara Healthcare

Sarah Hickman Auger: Healthcare organizations are facing pressure from all sides navigating talent shortages, boosting resilience for disrupted supply chains, and dealing with margin pressures. It's more important than ever that healthcare teams have the tools and the technology that they need to adapt to changes quickly and position for success. I'm your host, Sarah Hickman Auger, industry director for healthcare solution marketing here at Workday. I'm so happy to be joined by Steve Seykora, principal at Deloitte, and Mike Price, who is senior director of IT strategy and planning at Sentara Healthcare. Welcome, both of you.

Today we're gonna talk through healthcare trends and challenges and how the Workday industry accelerator for healthcare is going to drive value for healthcare organizations. So, Steve and Mike, thanks for joining. Let's start by doing some introductions. Steve, maybe you can start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your role at Deloitte.

Steve Seykora: So as Sarah said, my name is Steve Seykora. I'm a principal at Deloitte. And I've got responsibility for our Workday practice in the healthcare industry. So that's everything from the sales of our services, the delivery of our services, obviously customer satisfaction, and then the overall relationship with the Workday team. I've been in the Workday ecosystem since 2007. I was trying to count. I think I'm at about 13 or 14 Risings now.

Hickman Auger: Yeah, and we've gotten to work together on other projects, too.

Seykora: Right. So it's good to be here. I think the one unique thing about me that some people may not know-- I was Workday customer number 131, so.

Hickman Auger: I did not remember that.

Seykora: That's right. So I've consulted around the solution and I've been a customer of the solution as well.

Hickman Auger: Awesome. So you know what it's like to be there. So, Mike, tell us a little bit about your role at Sentara Healthcare.

Mike Price: Sure. I've been at Sentara for about four years now. I was brought in to create a centralized services shop within IT. So all of the business operations and project execution I get to work with. And then about two years ago I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to get involved in the Workday project. And so I served as the project director and I was partnered with a counterpart on the Deloitte side to organize the project. And then after we went live, I stayed on to organize what we call Central Sustain, which is our governance, release management, change management, standards, strategy, etc.

Hickman Auger: That's fantastic. You know, I was talking with Stephanie Schnittger earlier today about the results you guys are seeing. You're just in month five. So very exciting. You clearly did an incredible job with this project.

Price: We feel very fortunate to have such a wonderful partner in Deloitte and, and walk us through this and all the change management that went along with it. I think we've been able to stabilize very, very rapidly and start thinking about what our resource structure needs to be for optimization and really focusing on the end user experience.

Hickman Auger: It's fantastic. You know, it's one of the reasons we love partnering with Deloitte, because you bring such deep industry expertise to the table. Steve, why don't we have you sort of set the scene for us. Talk a little bit about the trends that Deloitte is seeing in the healthcare industry today and, and what we need to be aware of.

Seykora: Yeah. Thanks, Sarah. I think given where we are in the world today, COVID-19 is still out there, right and that's something that I think it looks like we could be dealing with, at least in the healthcare industry, for some time yet. So that is probably still at the top of sort of the trends in how healthcare organizations are dealing with that, and, and frankly the broader world is dealing with that. When I start to think of specifically healthcare trends, you mentioned at the onset that-- the talent shortage.

Hickman Auger:  Mm-hmm.

Seykora: There's a severe talent shortage. I think Mike could probably back me up on that one. We face that, obviously Sentara faces that daily as well as many of our other healthcare customers. The fight for talent in the healthcare industry is prevalent. It's there.

And it's not going away anytime soon. I think the other trend that we're seeing is really kind of innovative technologies--in the healthcare space, Workday obviously being one of them. But many others. Wearable technology is obviously out there. We all now wear Apple watches and those types of things, which obviously give us insight into our health and how many steps we're taking and other things like that. And so, that's obviously prevalent in the healthcare industry. I think another trend that we are seeing is the consolidation in the healthcare industry that continues from an M&A perspective. We have another client that we're working with right now, and during their implementation alone, they've acquired six other healthcare organizations.

Hickman Auger: Wow.

Seykora: So we are continuing to see that consolidation of the healthcare industry. And maybe just one more telehealth--I think is something that we've also seen, and it became much more prevalent over sort of this last two and a half, three years during COVID time where people maybe aren't going in to see their doctor as much and a lot of the doctor visits now are done via a telehealth solution. So those are just some of the trends that we're seeing in the healthcare space.

Hickman Auger: Thanks for sharing those. Mike  you're responsible for making sure you've got the IT foundation in place to adapt to all these trends. Can you talk a little bit about how they're impacting Sentara Health and what are the kinds of challenges that you're facing there?

Price: Yeah. It's been really interesting over the last three years for the provider side of healthcare. So when I think about talent shortages, it's not just, you know, technology or in this case just the corporate services areas. You know, we're fighting for resources in the clinical areas--just to staff our bedside. And so a couple of things that we've had to react to first and foremost, we have an increasingly virtual workforce. So we have to figure out not only you know, how we can expand our footprint and hire in more states, but how we also create that infrastructure and experience for our employees to be able to come in and be productive and effective very rapidly. And then I think the other part of that is our employees are now more marketable across the board than they've ever been before. And so when they come in to us, figuring out how to develop and retain them is incredibly difficult. And the expectations that they are coming in with and I'm not talking about generational expectations; I'm talking about all of our employees are coming in with an expectation that, "It will be easy for me to work for you" "I will be able to work for you from wherever I choose to do that." And so when we've got difficult systems to work with, when we've got clumsy onboarding processes, that makes it very difficult for us to be competitive. And these people can sit in their pajamas at home and get a higher-paying job, you know. So it's incredibly important for us to have those technologies that support a good onboarding and employee experience. 

Seykora: I heard somebody say that they want their work experience to kind of meet their life experience. And what they meant by that was everything that they kinda do today is via an iPad or an iPhone----and the last thing that folks wanna do is go into work and sit in front of a green screen that was implemented back in 1980.

Hickman Auger: Yeah.

Seykora: And, and so an organization like that, to Mike's point, is just not appealing. And so solutions like Workday and other solutions that are out there are really important to the employee experience.

Hickman Auger: It makes a lot of sense. I have talked with other technology leaders who talk about the fact that if you don't have the technology that is going to match these folks who are coming in at the top of their game, top of their practice, wanting to be really innovative, it's gonna be tough to keep them engaged  in what you're doing. So it's very clear that technology is critically important in terms of navigating what's going on in the healthcare industry today. Mike, coming straight off of your Workday deployment, what are some of the ways that you think Workday is gonna help you address some of these issues?

Price: Well, right off the bat I am accountable for delivering on a lofty business case [laughter] that justified the expense of doing Workday. So right off the bat we've gotta figure out how to retire 13 legacy systems.

We've gotta figure out what our data archival strategy looks like. And then I've gotta figure out not only how we retire those systems, but how we start gaining some of those efficiencies from the labor workforce perspective. So we're in this place right now with Workday where we're still working bugs out, we're still figuring out how we balance keeping the lights on with the more strategic work. And so we're trying to figure out what that sweet spot is from a resource perspective. So I would say right off the bat it would be figuring out how to deliver on the business case. And then the bigger piece that I think everyone is going to really have to be thoughtful about, is organizational change management and adoption.

Hickman Auger: Hmm.

Price: So, we can all assume that we can put technology together and put training together and people are going to just understand how to interact with it. But with something like this it really is changing the way that all of our employees do their job on a daily basis. And because it's so many different things to so many different people, it's not just about training or intuition when you're interacting with it. We found that we really have to be engaging our senior executive leadership to get, I call it air cover, to give us enough time to make sure that the system is stable, is set up properly, so that we then can connect that voice of customer into what we develop. And without that support from the senior executive level, we've seen that there's just a lot of noise coming from the customers that we're having trouble qualifying.

Hickman Auger: Hmm.

Price: So we really need help balancing where we're focusing from keeping the lights on to incorporating what we're hearing from our customers and making that experience better.

Hickman Auger: Makes a lot of sense, right? It's an incredible platform for transformation. And at the same time you need people to embrace that platform in order to move things forward. Steve, how does that match up to what you're seeing with some of your other clients? Where are the areas that they're really talking to you about, "We need Workday because we need to address one of the trends that you mentioned"?

Seykora: Yeah, I think it starts for me, anyways, from what I've heard a lot, it starts with the user experience. I mean, something that we need to kind of keep in mind with a lot of these healthcare organizations, and maybe this is a positive that came out of COVID, it sort of shined a light on sort of the back office systems–

Hickman Auger: Hmm.

Seykora: --of a lot of these healthcare organizations. And, and that light sorta shined upon some of those systems exposed some things maybe that those systems didn't wanna see. And so what we're seeing is a lot of organizations kind of taking a lot at their ERP solutions, across the board, HR, finance, and supply chain. and really taking a look at what's out there, and obviously Workday falls into that category. But for me, it starts with user experience, like Mike talked about.

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Seykora: I know earlier I talked about life experience meeting work experience. But, that user experience, for a lot of organizations, is incredibly important. And as I said before, people don't wanna come into work and take a step back into 1980. They really want to have work meet them where their personal life is. And so that user experience is incredibly important. I think one of the other things that we are kinda focused on with a lot of our healthcare customers as well is the overall efficiency of the system–

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Seykora: and making sure that that system-- and it's a little bit of  what Mike talked about, with the lights on versus kind of becoming a bit more strategic with the system. And that's helping organizations kind of right off the bat during the implementation start off with more of a preconfigured healthcare experience, if you will to make that more efficient, more effective. We're bringing best practices to the table right out of the gate, from an HR, finance, supply chain perspective, that then hopefully lessens on the back end a lot of that "lights-on" work and some of that transactional or updating type work that Mike referred to in the past.

Hickman Auger: I'm so glad you mentioned that, how do we reduce the time on that journey for folks. Of course, Workday and Deloitte are partnering on an industry accelerator for healthcare, specifically to help smooth the path for healthcare organizations in their digital modernization journey. So can you take one minute to talk about what the accelerator program is, why it matters to healthcare organizations?

Seykora: Yeah. So this is something we're really excited about. The healthcare accelerator is basically a preconfigured healthcare tenant of Workday from an HR, finance, supply chain perspective. What it does is it allows organizations and it allows us as the implementation partner of organizations, to come in with best practice healthcare processes already configured in the system ready to go that an organization, we can sit down during design, kinda lay it out in front of the client and basically say, "This is the premiere healthcare process to hiring folks" insert the process in this case hiring folks. And our client then knows it's best practice; it's preconfigured; the configuration is set.

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Seykora: It's ready to go. And so what that does on the front end and then throughout the implementation is the client knows they're getting best practices, number one----the timeline for the implementation could decrease.

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Seykora: The efficiency that I talked about earlier, from a project perspective, becomes better.

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Seykora: And so it's something that we're very excited to partner with Workday on. And frankly it's how we are going to be moving forward with all of our implementations.

Hickman Auger: That's great to hear. I'm so glad you talked about smoothing the path for healthcare organizations on their journey to digital modernization, because of course the industry accelerator for healthcare that Deloitte and Workday are partnering on is designed to do just that. So we think about the three big benefits as how do we accelerate that move to cloud to get you faster time to value, how do we scale that value across an open ecosystem, and how do we drive faster innovation with the community. And, we're really leaning heavily on our partners like Deloitte to bring the industry expertise to help us make that happen for our common clients. Can you talk a little bit about what Deloitte brings specifically to the table for industry accelerators?

Seykora: So first and foremost, and one of the things that we're probably the most proud of, outside of our Workday practice, is our healthcare industry practice.

Hickman Auger: Hmm.

Seykora: It’s one of our largest practices within Deloitte. And we bring services to our healthcare customers that are unmatched in the marketplace, everything from supply chain consulting, pharmacy consulting, our healthcare practices is not only made up of practitioners, but some of those practitioners and, frankly, a fair amount of those practitioners are nurses and doctors.

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Seykora: And so they really the offerings in that practice span the gamut. So you take that practice, and what that practice can deliver, from purely a healthcare perspective, and you couple that, then, with our Workday team in healthcare, and I think that's a pretty powerful offering to our customers in healthcare, by which you have the technology experience, you layer on the accelerator, you layer on the efficiencies, and, Sarah, those three areas that you just talked about, but then you back that all up with Deloitte's healthcare industry knowledge and those practitioners behind that, and frankly, we at Deloitte feel like we can tackle all of our clients' problems from technology, Workday, all the way through the healthcare spectrum.

Hickman Auger: That's why we love the partnership, right, because the healthcare technology ecosystem is vast and we need to be able to make those connections for our customers to really de-risk those deployments and get you to where you wanna be faster. So, Mike, you have been working with Workday and Deloitte on your project. Can you talk a little bit about what that experience was like and what kind of advantages do you see coming from this accelerator program?

Price: So we were in the keynote kickoff this morning, and I'm sitting there and I'm looking at this amazing user experience that is being provided by the suite of Workday. And I'm realizing that we can't do all of those things in healthcare yet. There are certain complexities within our environment that either we're so far away from best practice or, you know, Workday has identified some of these things as gaps and Workday is actively developing that functionality or partnering with other companies to provide some of these services. But as I'm sitting there and I'm looking at "Man, it would be so awesome to have kind of this out-of-the-box experience--" and when I'm thinking about where we are at and where I would be today if we didn't have an implementation partner like Deloitte--it probably would have been a three-year project. Deloitte was able to bring a lot of those best practices. Now whether or not Sentara wholesale accepted all of those best practices, because of culture is potentially a different story. But nonetheless, that experience was part of the design that they brought forward. And then they had the bench to back it up. So as I'm thinking about who we brought to the table at Sentara, we had people that knew Sentara really well--but didn't necessarily know how to change or implement best practices into our build. And so Deloitte was able to come in and very respectfully show us what that would look like. And so that's really where I'm excited. So I'm excited for the accelerator to help healthcare catch up–

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Price: and I think the biggest part of it is really incorporating business process change management into the approach that comes from the best practices that now we as a customer will be able to see and touch and feel and say, "We don't have to do it like we've always done it, because it's already built, it's already configured; start with the 'Why won't this work for us?'" And it was hard to do that conceptually when we were in our build.

Hickman Auger: Yeah, it definitely helps to have an outside expert come in and, for lack of a better phrase, help you get out of your own way to embrace what they know --has been proven across client after client. Mike, what are some of the goals that you hope to accomplish as you're looking to maximize your use of Workday and your relationship with Deloitte? We talk about the go-live is really just the beginning, not the end, so as you're thinking about how to maximize that value from the technology and the relationship going forward, what's top of mind?

Price: I think this release that happened last weekend was eye-opening for us. I thought it went exceptionally well. So kudos to Workday and then also to the Sentara and Deloitte AMS team that's been helping us prep for it. But it shined a light on a structure that I'm starting to get more clarity around that we need to set up going forward. So we call our support organization the Sustain organization–

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Price: --and we initially had kinda spec'd out the Sustain organization based on how many resources we thought it would just take to run Workday support and all the different areas. And what I'm finding - and this is probably a little bit maturity but also probably just justified - is the resources that we spec'd out, we're using entirely on keeping the lights open. So break-fix, enhancements, things like that. And we're having trouble staffing the more strategic work. So when we shifted all of the resources over to R2 release planning, we had to put a freeze on all of our break-fix stuff, and it just kinda sat there. So what I envision for the next step is figuring out how to shift our very specialized resources that understand Sentara, that understand business process, that have been trained more deeply on Workday, over into a more strategic part of the organization that's focused on user experience, Workday functionality adoption, etc. and then thinking about, you know, what a more-- I don't wanna call it, um, commoditized resource, but, a different kind of resource to focus on keeping the lights on--and the doors open. And so as I'm thinking about how we're going to be partnering with Deloitte in the future, it's one of those two areas, and we're not sure what it would look like yet. But I'm very confident at this point that I need help somewhere.

Hickman Auger: Right.

Seykora: Sarah, this is actually something Mike and I were talking about quite a bit last night is where that best kinda place to play is and assist.

Hickman Auger: Well, so I know from the Workday perspective, one of the things we're really excited about in terms of the industry accelerator program is that, we will be able to partner with Deloitte not just on getting people to that first deployment but on continuing innovation and really targeting those industry-specific use cases filling in that final mile for folks as healthcare is changing so fast. 

Seykora: And, I think you touched on this just a little bit ago. I think it's really important for Workday prospects to realize that day one of going live is day one of your journey.

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Seykora: Workday is a living and breathing system. There's releases, like Mike said. And it's all about sorta continuing to adopt all that functionality that's coming at you. It's really, really important. From a purely Deloitte perspective and some of the things that we've been talking about working and partnering with Workday on, that we feel are needs in the healthcare industry, it probably starts with physician compensation--and working with the Workday team to really kinda come up with maybe a solution that we can assist in building in the Workday functionality around physician comp. It's gonna be really challenging. We've had conversations internally at Deloitte about how we would do that. We would probably need to pull in a number of folks from our healthcare industry team--probably folks from our compensation team, folks from our Workday team. It'll take a very big team, along with probably a significant group of folks from Workday. But there is a tremendous need in the healthcare space with physician compensation and being able to house that in a system like Workday in some form or fashion. So that's one area that we're really focusing on and, and really kinda looking to see whether or not we can partner with Workday to come up with a solution for that.

Hickman Auger: So I love that example, because it is such a complex process for a lot of organizations right now, and we see folks handle it really differently. So having Deloitte come in and say, "Okay, we've done the analysis, this is what we know about what you're trying to accomplish and what will make it efficient and sustainable and get you to where you need to be. And, oh, by the way, we already built the foundation for you, so let's set up this preconfigured solution and figure out how to make the minor adjustments for your organization," It's exactly why we set up this program.

This is so new, and yet Mike, Sentara has your relationship with Workday is not new, right. We've been working together across this project. Steve, we personally have been working together in addition to how long Deloitte and Workday have been partnering. From both the customer perspective and the partner perspective, can you share any advice that organizations should be thinking about in terms of how to maximize the value that they get out of a program like this?

Price: For Sentara it was a balancing act. The reason I say it's a balancing act is because we had time constraints

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Price: --we had budgets that we had to adhere to. If I had an open checkbook and I could spend two years on business process redesign so that everything that went into our build was perfect and our users--could really interact with it the way they wanted to on day one, then I would do that. But, as it was, we spend six months on design and then another six months on build, another six months on test, and then we go live. It is not enough time to really change business processes and change culture. And so you have to be going into this with your eyes open and say, "We've got a great system that we went live with. We've paid all of our employees. We haven't missed any of those core business functions. But we've got a year of optimization. And then on top of that we've gotta start going back and looking at all the things that maybe we didn't implement that were out of the box." And so I'd really like to start figuring out what our path to, what Workday model is even if that means replacing more systems that we've got in place. So the mantra was that integration trumps preference. And we're still not quite where we wanna be.

Hickman Auger: That makes a lot of sense in terms of just being realistic about the fact that you start with, "This is where we want it to get, and there are opportunities to continue to improve." The technology is already there; you just wanna adopt additional capabilities and then really extend those capabilities with, with the kind of solutions that Steve was talking about earlier. So, Steve, what about you from the partner perspective? Any advice that you would give to clients?

Seykora: Yeah. We said about the journey and day one, right?

Hickman Auger: Mm-hmm.

Seykora: So, obviously the accelerator, during implementation, is going to assist organizations from an implementation perspective, like Mike said. We have a business process. We have design for six months. We had build. We had test. We're hoping that the accelerator makes that a bit more efficient.

We're hoping that with clients more best practice is adopted. But to Mike's point, the change of culture still needs to happen within organizations, right, and that's challenging. That change is always hard. To me, though, the benefits of something like this isn't so much during the go-live - obviously the accelerator is - but what I would tell clients is that, really that journey starts on day one. And there is an optimization period that I completely agree with Mike. But during that optimization period, clients have to kinda keep their eye on the strategic aspect of all of this, too, right? And new functionality is coming. Are we gonna adopt that functionality or we're not going to adopt that functionality? I know there are organizations that take a stance where maybe not a whole lot is adopted, not a whole lot is turned on. I think that's a shame----because I think the Workday solution kind of passes them by then. And so to me I think as a client, when I was a client, I think the important thing that we always thought of was-- and we love the releases and, believe this or not, back then there were four a year-- we love the releases because we viewed it as a new technology solution coming our way, four times a year. And so it was almost exciting to see the release notes and then sorta put the strategy and the plan around how we were gonna implement that, how we were gonna use it, and to me that's the value of Workday. And that's what-- as a, as a client and what I tell my clients today,  that's the power of Workday right there.

Hickman Auger: So it's funny you mention that we used to have even more releases. We actually scaled back because of what you and Mikeare talking about in terms of change management. Like, what we heard from our clients is, "This is incredible. We're so excited. We need to absorb the new capabilities for a little bit longer before we start pulling in the next set of capabilities." And what's great about a system that's native to the cloud is there's no customer left behind, right? All of that functionality is just waiting for you whenever you're ready to turn it on. So you can embrace that day one, or you can look at your schedule and determine how the capabilities map to your priorities and your roadmap for making those changes, and how do you prepare your team to accept them. As we're looking to the future, any final thoughts on  where we're going as a healthcare industry and how digital modernization is gonna help us not just survive the changes again but really thrive in the new world of health?

Price: So one of the interesting things that I've seen over the last two years just while I was interacting with the Workday project was how important technology was to growth and scalability. And so the organizations that don't have technology platforms that marry up well with other organizations or are very easily and rapidly scalable to bring on more resources, more employees, those are the the organizations that will be on the wrong side of the acquisition. I think it's incredibly important that you've got a platform like this that lets you be that nimble.

Hickman Auger: Great example. And, you know, Steve, you talked about consolidation is a continuing trend, so making sure you're in a position to scale quickly is so important. What about you Steve? Any final thoughts on the future and what is gonna help organizations be their best selves?

Seykora: The one thing that I absolutely love about working in the healthcare industry and, and Matt Brandt touched on this yesterday during the healthcare kickoff - we're in some way assisting with the care of people, right?

Hickman Auger: Hmm.

Seykora: We're implementing technology, but we're maybe making life easier for that doc or that nurse or what have you, via this technology implementation. I absolutely love that about working in the healthcare industry. With that said, the healthcare industry is absolutely dynamic.

Hickman Auger: Hmm.

Seykora: So there's two things: the care for people, but second, just the dynamic nature of healthcare is so exciting to work in. And so, for me, when I think of what lies ahead in this industry, it's gonna continue to be dynamic. We're gonna continue to see consolidation throughout the industry, and we're gonna continue to see a lot of technology innovation. Things like telehealth. I mentioned wearables. There's so many more out there on the horizon. The other thing that I didn't mention, Sarah, that's also gonna be a huge trend moving forward that we're gonna have to kinda keep our eyes on as, as partners of healthcare organizations is just the amount of data. that's gonna be out there and managing that data and making correct decisions off of that data. We were talking about Workday today. There's Workday. There are other technological solutions throughout healthcare. All of these solutions that are in the healthcare space today are providing us so much data that can be used to care for people and that almost makes this industry as dynamic as it is. So just the management of that data, making decisions off of that data, that's what I think lies ahead. And then the continuation, as I mentioned earlier, with back office technologies expiring or not being where they need to be. I think that's also gonna continue. And we're seeing that, just working closely with our partners at Workday, the number of organizations that are really looking to make a change in that area.

Hickman Auger: Yeah, it's a great point. We see the urgency building as folks realize how quickly things are changing in the industry and that the old tools just can't adapt fast enough. And being on a modern cloud platform gives you the ability to be more nimble, as Mike said, and really feel confident that you're charting a course as opposed to just responding to what's happening around you. So thank you both for being here today, taking time out of this busy Rising conference to chat about this. We've been talking about the industry accelerators program with Steve Seykora from Deloitte and Mike Price from Sentara Health. And we're really excited about what it means for our healthcare organizations. We're really excited about what it means for our healthcare customers. Don't forget to follow us wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, and remember you can find our entire catalog at Workday.com/podcasts. I'm your host, Sarah Hickman Auger, and I hope you have a great workday.