← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
Hi everyone, this is Lucas Voss with Beckers Healthcare. Thanks so much for tuning in to the Beckers Healthcare podcast series. Great to have you on. We're talking about how it is helping Cape Fear Valley Health System to embrace a playbook for future acquisitions, engage employees and continue to drive efficiency and cost savings. And I'm very excited to be joined by Phil Wood, Chief Information Officer of Cape Fear Valley Health System in North Carolina. Phil, thanks for being here today.
- [00:24]
B
It's great to have you, Lucas, great to be here. Thank you for having me.
- [00:28]
A
We'll have to start with introductions here for our audience. Can you talk a little bit about your position and a little bit about Cape Fear Valley Health System and your role?
- [00:36]
B
Sure, absolutely. So Cape Fear Valley Health System is a not for profit health system based here in Fayetteville, North Carolina. We are eight hospitals and 93 plus clinics with over a thousand physicians and more than 8,000 skilled professionals. And we all have one focus, our patients. Right. So we've got rural critical access hospitals that we support. And you know, the, the beautiful thing about what we're doing in our journey is talking about our ERP system, one major ERP system and our emr. I've been a CIO here at Cape Fear Valley for about 12 years now, grew up traditional. It started in healthcare and learned a lot about the business process and technology through some great mentors that helped. CIOs didn't exist when I first started in it, by the way, so when it came along, it became okay. Well, you know, healthcare business and understanding how to make a difference for your patients and be a part of something much larger became really one of my mantras that I said I've got to do this. And so moved into the role at some point. Not moved, it just applied and came into the role. And I have a CEO who's got an IT backdrop, if you will. And so I've been very fortunate to have somebody who understands that language is what. And sometimes that's good, sometimes that's bad because you can't get past them, but you know, the, the journey for that has been great. To be able to make a difference, to bring systems like this into play, to be able to help not only our employees, our clinicians, which is very important in the journey as well. Nothing should be done without the clinicians, but as well as our patients.
- [02:05]
A
Yeah. North Carolina is also such a diverse market. I always think about that too. There's so, so many different factors to care. In North Carolina. We talk quite a bit about growth, especially with mid sized health systems. Can you touch a little bit on how Cape Fear Valley Health System is growing right now and some of the challenges that you've countered along the way and also some of the opportunities that you're seeing within your growth strategy?
- [02:30]
B
Sure, be happy to. So you know, for us it's, it's always going to be continuing to grow and that is done with more and more independent physicians coming on practices that we may acquire as we try to serve our community and offer those services, if you will. So you know, some of the things that come along with that as we do those acquisitions and come about would be around what I would say. There are different systems that you have to bring in, so you really try to integrate unified to what you are. There are different practices that happen with that. Billing is a little bit different in some of those cases. So we tend to bring that back to one thing which I call when we are dealing with new acquisitions and that's culture. And culture is really important to us. And those practices offered great services and Cape Valley Health does the same thing too. But we try to align those cultures and that's one of those things that for our success to be what IT needs to be, that culture has to be aligned. So first of all we have what's an overall IT Governance council that oversees all types of things involving IT systems, applications, services, you name it. What goes beyond there that may be more specific to workday is we actually have a workday committee that reports up to that IT Governance council as well. And how that workday committee is formed is there is that cross functional team we just talked about. But even under the workday committee there are three separate subcommittees, there is an HCM committee, there is a finance committee and there's a supply chain committee. So therefore they get to independently work through the particular system, services or problems that they encounter. So that we come up with solutions, gets approved. Then it comes up to the workday governance council where everyone gets to hear it holistically. So that workday governance council is comprised of members of leaders of the finance, ACM and supply chain. And the same thing for each of those committees, right? They bring their stuff up. Once it comes to that workday governance council, you know, decisions are made. Therefore what we go forward, what we have to do with workday, whether we're going to have to add something on. Like again, we're getting ready to go through time and attendance so everyone understands the impact. And that then goes up to the IT Governance Council which has your key leaders in the organization, such as members of the C suite, legal and other teams too. So therefore, holistically, it has gone through at least two or three iterations to say yes, this is going to make sense and it's completely go forward or if there's questions, then it goes back and we go back to try to solve the problem. What was the really, was the problem set at that point? And let's find a solution for it. And AI is the same thing apart because AI is a part of this. So there's a separate AI Governance council that does lend itself back to when AI is coming from workday versus AI from Epic or Microsoft. And again, those governing roles help us to make sure we meet the standards that should be in place.
- [05:31]
A
Yeah, it's the foundation for everything else. Right. Otherwise nothing can work really. I love that you mentioned that as well. You've touched on the EHR piece and the ERP piece and that you're focusing on this to be able to modernize, modernizing CO platforms across the organization, really, especially with the erp. With Workday about two years ago, can you touch a little bit on how these enterprise technology investments have paid off in terms of helping the organization grow but also scale while managing costs?
- [06:02]
B
Absolutely. So yes, you're right. We actually started our ERP journey with Workday two years ago, I think it was on April 1st, as a matter of fact. No April Fool's joke. No, no Joe, no jokes there. Right. And it's been important to us to be able to unify disparate systems. You know, the cost savings, the things that will occur with that are just so important to an organization. Especially when you think of what healthcare has to deal with on an ongoing basis. And by going to work day, we think of things that like time and attendance, learning management systems, those type of systems that we can bring forward and unify and sort of reduce cost there. We also think about just the data and the ability to reduce manual errors, the things that we were doing manually for things that weren't in other systems. So this for scalability and being able to go forward has been important to us. Having that architecture, to be able to add things as we grow, you know, really is important. And we're going through some of that now thanks to our Workday journey. And that's been really, whether it's vendor management as one of the things that we're doing now and using one of the products called Vendly. Again, time and attendance, these, these things are helping us trajectory, you know, go forward in our trajectory is that helping.
- [07:23]
A
With integration too, being able, being more integrated across the organization?
- [07:29]
B
Absolutely, it does. And when we think about our EMR and our ERP and things we are going to do for the physicians to help them and reduce things that may be to burnout, which more is in our EMR system. But again, scheduling and advanced scheduling, these are things that when we have that interoperability with workday to epic, it is serving such a great purpose.
- [07:51]
A
Yeah, absolutely. You've touched on culture and how important culture is. Right. And we know there's a lot of burnout. There are workforce shortages across the board in many healthcare functions. And again, culture, employee experience is so incredibly important, not just for you, but in general in health care. Can you share a few examples of the effect that workday has had on your employees, the integrations, both your HR and finance teams and sort of the broader care of providers.
- [08:22]
B
One of the good things that has really come about for us is that going digital with workday. Right. So we were on premise before and just for the fact of going into the cloud and now giving us more ability. So for our employees, it's now at their fingertips. It is fantastic. Right. They love being able to access and see their pay, they love to be able to get communication about events, recognition, rewards. These are things for our recruiting efforts. These are the things that give us the ability to do so much more to attract the workforce, to attract talent, to keep our talent, to retain them. And we, I think we saw a data point just last week. I think I got and it was we are at 49% for our mobile usage of workday, which was really pretty good for the workforce. And considering where we started and how big of a change that was and understanding the security behind it that we needed to put in place, because that's important too. It's been pretty amazing to watch and see that, how everyone in our workforce has embraced that as well as the talent that we're trying to recruit.
- [09:29]
A
Yeah, the accessibility piece is so important too. I think it creates. The barriers are gone. Essentially, like you've mentioned, it's. Everybody has access. Accessibility is huge. So important. Thanks for sharing that. I think that's a, that's a key stat that you've mentioned there. You've made that step, right? You work with workday, you made the steps with ERP, with EHR, etc. There's a lot of organizations who haven't done that yet. Right. It comes to building business cases to, to evaluate different options, different systems. Right. Or even AI capabilities. There's so Many different things that organizations have to think about that, that they can think about today. As you think about your colleagues, your peers, what is the most important advice you have for them for other health care CIOs in the market, especially in those small to mid sized health systems, as they're looking at this issue and at integration.
- [10:23]
B
And I think Lucas, you touched just on something. Building a business case is really important, right? It's got to be clear, you know, there's roi, we went through a whole process, so that's one of the first things that you start with. And AI is the wonderful buzzword of today's times. And so I think as everybody's thinking about their systems, it's how do we introduce AI, how do we go after. AI is a great thing, but don't just chase it for that one word, right, or those two letters, you know, think about the true impact that what you need. And so again, reducing bottlenecks, helping our supply chain get that inventory and clearing those things and making sure they have good KPIs was important. Evaluation of your ERP for what you're going to, you need to have a good vetting process for that. We really went through a good vetting process and workday came out, you know, heads, heads above everyone else for what we needed to do. And it is met every expectation that we expected of that system due to the process that we had in place that had to have leadership support. So we also think about your stakeholders and the governance of that. Right. And again the culture change that will come with that, that we mentioned earlier. So those are really important things. C Suite has to, they all have to, we all have to be aligned. And then it has to be cross functional governance to include multiple teams from legal to hr, clinical, you name it. So we were all inclusive. This was not what we would call an IT system or an IT installation. It's an organizational and that was really important to us. So I cannot forget this one piece though. In anything that we do in training, training is really super important and that's something that has to be there. And if you invest in the people in the training, just like we do in today's times with cyber security or anything else, we will be able to be more successful in this adoption and utilization and also building for what those next three years look like, as we've done for every system that we've purchased. And one of the things that I know a lot of my peers and we discuss in other groups and forums is really about our partners and vendors who help us do the implementation and then that was important as far as what to look for is just making sure that you have a vendor that's a partner that is going to help you with your implementation and process. So make sure that you're in it together as a partnership. Yeah.
- [12:50]
A
Just like we started the conversation right, the culture piece is so important to be able to facilitate all of this and and have that change be really meaningful for the organization. Phil, thanks so much for taking the time. It's great to have you.
- [13:01]
B
Well, it was great to be here and I really enjoy if I can help anybody understand our journey in a process but how we've become more efficient, what acquisitions have done for us. This system Workday has been really a great product for us.
- [13:15]
A
Phil, thanks so much for being here again. And we also want to thank our podcast sponsor, Workday. You can tune into more podcasts from Becker's Healthcare by visiting our podcast page@beckershospitalreview.com.