Transforming Healthcare with Innovative HR Technology

Transforming Healthcare with Innovative HR Technology

Hosts: Steve Boese & Trish Steed

Guest: Elina Petrillo, VP, Head of HR Technology at Northwell Health

Today, Steve and Trish are at Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas. They spoke with Elina Petrillo about transforming HR processes in healthcare with AI.

– Northwell Health’s Digital Transformation Journey

– Challenges and Successes During the Pandemic

– User Experience and Adoption of HR Technology

– implementation of the Oracle Digital Assistant

– Northwell Health Winning an Oracle Innovation Award in 2024

Thank you for your continued support of the show and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts!

Transcript follows:

Steve 0:00
Steve, welcome to the HR Happy Hour Show. My name is Steve Boese. I’m with Trish Steed. Trish, how are you?

Trish 0:33
I’m fantastic. It’s nice to be here in person.

Steve 0:35
It is fantastic to be in person. We are live recording today from Oracle CloudWorld in Las Vegas, in a beautiful Venetian sands, kind of conference center, which I love. I love coming here.

Trish 0:48
I do it oddly, feels like coming home. We’ve been here so many years and so often. So yeah, it’s great.

Steve 0:53
It’s great to come back after a while and you see, oh, there’s a new restaurant over there. I gotta try that.

Trish 0:54
We noticed the new carpeting. Like, let’s be real. We were like noticing new carpeting.

Steve 1:02
They do great job here. It’s great to be here. This is a fantastic event. We just spilled out of the morning keynote with Safra Catz and a collection of Oracle customers talking about transformation, AI, that’s right, impacting business customer experience, employee experience, through Oracle technologies and just, I love coming to CloudWorld each year.

Trish 1:23
I do too. And of all of the customers she had on stage, the one that I think was my favorite, was the CIO from the CIA, did you know? I didn’t know that was their longest standing customer.

Steve 1:33
I did not know that. It was like 1977.

Trish 1:36
I think so the longevity, I was a former Oracle customers, so not that far back, but yeah, really impressive to hear what they’ve done. And you weren’t doing enterprise tech, and I was doing, I was dreaming about it. I was dreaming about it back in the day.

Steve 1:51
Speaking of good transition, we’re lucky when we come to cloud world to get to connect with so many great customers of Oracle to help share some of their digital transformation and HR transformation stories. We are lucky enough honored actually to be joined this morning by Elina Petrillo from Northwell Health to talk about transforming HR with AI and plenty more. Elina is the VP and head of HR Technology at Northwell Health. She leads enterprise wide HR digital transformation to improve and innovate workforce experience, drive efficiencies, harness data insights and prepare the business for growth. She’s responsible for the strategic direction, design, implementation and execution of the HR tech roadmap, by collaborating with the business and HR leaders and cross functional teams to help implement Oracle HCM and plenty more. Elina, welcome to the show. How are you?

Elina Petrillo 2:46
Hello. Very excited to be here.

Steve 2:48
Great to see you. Thanks for taking a few minutes today. It’s a busy event, I’m sure for you, but great to see you. Same here. Hey. Tell us a little bit about you, of course, and a little bit about Northwell Health. I’m familiar with Northwell Health. I spent a lot of time in the northeast, but for folks who maybe don’t know we’d love to know a little bit more about that story, too.

Elina Petrillo 3:06
Yeah, Northwell Health is the largest employer in New York State. We have 26 hospital and over 900 ambulatory services. We serve a really large community, and mostly located in New York. And I’m sure many of you are watching Netflix emergency NYC that features all the things that Norfolk health does for our community.

Trish 3:38
That’s fantastic. Well, that’s a good plug, too. If someone hasn’t tuned into that yet, they can now make that connection. So wonderful.

Steve 3:46
Elina, we love to know a little bit more about the sort of the transformation journey. Healthcare, probably the, you know, the country’s most essential right, industry slash service, serving the community, providing, you know, essential services for probably, I’m guessing, maybe millions of people, probably on an annual basis, love to learn a little bit more about North Wall health and kind of the journey you’ve been on over the last, you know, several years, as far back as you’d like to tell us.

Elina Petrillo 4:13
We wanted to be on digital transformation journey, and started this journey just before covid. And we had this grandiose vision to implement digital services, starting with HR, to really change experience for all of the team members at Northwell. And then once we were knee deep in implementation, covid, hit, wow. And you know, many of you know that New York was hit really hard, and Northwell actually treated most patients in the nation, you know, with covid. So we decided not to stop project. So within two weeks, we. We the entire health system fully transitioned, who could remotely more than 80% of our team members start using teams. And our HR team, besides doing tremendous job trying to support Northwell Health with the staffing, continued to implement the project, so we delayed a little bit, but ultimately decided to go live in January of 2021, so think about timeline, right?

Steve 5:32
This is crazy because that’s the, honestly, the early first year, year and a half, of covid, exactly, New York City, the, I know you’re not only in the city, but the epicenter, right? Yes, of all the challenges and, gosh, it’s amazing and it’s fascinating.

Elina Petrillo 5:49
Like, even you know, human memory, right? Like you forget all the, you know, scary and crazy things, and you remember exciting part. But in the last three years, I talk a lot about, you know, 2021, was really hard year, because not only you bringing system life, but we had a really big goal from senior leadership of Northwell, you know, everyone was, you know, sort of starting to stabilize from all the craziness that was going on in the years before, and we really did not want to take anyone off the floor doing clinical work, and, you know, start training on the new system. So we kind of went live with the system with a very minimum training. We used Oracle guided learning, which was extremely helpful. But 2021, was really year of survival for us. You know, survive the, you know, the aftermath of, you know, workforce being really strained from all the work sure that they had to do, bringing them on a new system, making sure people get paid on time and accurately, and now here we are back at Oracle conference 2024 and I think you know, winning Oracle Innovation Award is a testament that we not only survived, but we are innovating and thriving and bringing latest technology to our team members that honestly deserve it.

Trish 7:25
What a great story. You know, as someone who’s implemented large scale technology, definitely not during something like covid, there’s always this gap of handling the user experience. And are people really going to use this having, I’m sure, gone through that before covid. What is, how would you compare the two times, right, with having more minimal training, the guided learning to maybe transformations you’ve done in the past with technology? Was it? Did you find that people were easier to embrace this because it was a time of kind of change in upheaval in the entire system, or was it harder?

Elina Petrillo 8:04
You know, I would say that we definitely paid attention to what experience would look like for the team members, right? So having software available on mobile was a game changer, right? So that you could tell people you could do on mobile your open enrollment, right? There are studies that say sometimes people take longer time to select pair of shoes versus select your benefits options.

Steve 8:34
It depends on the shoes. But yeah, I think that’s very apt, right? So many folks just simply roll over their selections from the prior year without giving it too much thought, right?

Elina Petrillo 8:47
We want this experience to be seamless, but we also want this to be meaningful, right? So if someone you know, if someone had, you know, Birth of the new family member, or they going through something personally difficult that they able to navigate through the system and select what they needed. So we definitely see really nice adoption during times like open enrollment or, you know, when you know our team members, especially clinicians, that work overtime or get some additional pay that they really need to look at the pay slips and know what they got paid for, with doing merit and pay for performance. So that’s another peak that we get in w2 so really quickly being able to get the document that you need, you know, send it to your accountant, get notifications. All of this creates good experience, which ultimately builds on adoption, and then it sort of created a foundation for us to continue to build on so. So I would say, once we went live with open enrollment, we continue to collect annual surveys and asking team members what else we could improve, and then the next year, we highlight the things that people were recommending and that we implemented.

Elina Petrillo 10:19
So it’s not, you know, try to overwhelm everyone with, you know, massive amount of surveys, but have it very specific for topic of use of HR technology, what team members are looking for. You know, another big customer of HR are the leaders, right? So leaders, especially in healthcare setting, you know, they managing clinical work, they trying to inspire and engage clinicians to serve their communities, and we take care of people that serve others. So how do we make those manage your self service interactions meaningful. So if you remember, you know, 2122 were really difficult years to recruit and retain talent. Northwell has always been Employer of Choice. We have won, you know, best company to work for awards and stuff like this. But, you know, our turnover have taken a deep and, you know, we looked at this very seriously from all aspects, but experience and technology as well, the way, how we recruit, the way, how we inspire and entertain people so giving leaders the tools to do their job, and even especially recruiting, you know, starting from requesting backfill or creating a new position, getting new candidates to Interview, give feedback and recruit them, onboard them, a really big deal for us. So recruitment continues to be one of the top strategic priorities for my function, and how do we support and elevate that group as well?

Steve 12:15
It’s easy to forget, as you said, right. Even with the worst impacts of covid. It’s easy to few years now away, right? To think, oh, man, that was really awful. But we sort of maybe gloss over it a little bit. But the talent crunches that happened in 21 and 22 particularly in healthcare, were remarkable, right? I mean, there were story after story of providers around the country just simply unable to find people, and certainly at the same time, many of these healthcare clinicians and providers and healthcare workers were burning out. Yeah, right, the covid years were so difficult and trying for nurses and doctors and staff and really everybody who was working in those facilities in those first couple of years, people were leaving the profession as well, and couldn’t, couldn’t get people trained up right to replace so the challenge there remarkable. And at the same time you’re thinking, Well, how do we stem that? How do we stem that tide? We have to try to retain the people we have right and take care of them as well. So are there some elements you guys think about from a technology perspective, to say, hey, let’s really support these people who are here right as best we can so we can maybe hold on to them a little bit longer and make their experience a little bit more fulfilling.

Elina Petrillo 13:30
Yeah, absolutely. I would say Northwell has always done a remarkable job with, you know, looking at the retention and deploying multiple strategies. I think we are back to our pre covid years in terms of retention, okay, but technology is important, right? Number one is, in our day to day life, we’re using a lot of technology, and when we come to work all of a sudden, like you’ve gone 100 years backwards, right? So how do we bring those tools and sense of whatever people are using in their day to day life, to work as well. And I think, you know our team members, when they are candidates and searching for a job, trying to understand, what’s the brand of Northwell? What do we do? What we’re passionate about what our mission starting from that, and then going for onboarding experience, and then you there right how you being supported. What tools do you have? And then the idea that we care about your career growth, we care about your development. And where does it show up in HR technology, I think, is really important as well. So there is a lot of investment that’s going on thinking through that lens. And that could be, you know, agile, using agile and continuous improvement for the practices that we already. Have or editing something new that will, you know, sort of amplify that experience.

Elina Petrillo 15:08
So this year is especially exciting year for HR technology, because Northwell CHRO ultimately was on the mission to reimagine the way how HR delivers services to Northwell. And they also they reorganized our entire HR organization to be structured based on four personas, so we have a team that supports team members, and they dedicate all of the efforts to looking at team member experience, and it could be employee health services, you know, payroll HR customer service that answers your phone or answers your online chat bot And then the second persona, leaders, right? I talked about, people don’t leave organizations, they leave leaders, right? So how do we have right leaders that support you? And then we have, obviously, big business persona, Northwell continues to bring on new businesses go through additional mergers and acquisition. So it’s a really important customer for us to take care of and bring them the right analytics. Think about workforce planning, you know, things like that. And then myself, as a head of HR technology, my customer is HR, right? So we are. We are here. We exist to make sure that HR is enabled to do all the things that they promise to their customers. And so we double down on understanding what each persona needs are, and then map them to technology capabilities. And that could be, you know, looking at the recruitment and saying, 500,000 people apply for a job at Northwell. Whoa, so how do we match those candidates using Oracle technology.

Elina Petrillo 17:23
And then, obviously, one of the biggest reasons we hear this time at Oracle conference is to receive an award for our innovation with Oracle digital assistant. And you know, the main goal for Oracle digital assistant was that we really wanted in HR mimic what Northwell, or any kind of a healthcare does, and it’s 24/7 operations. So HR is not skilled for that. You know, we don’t have people that able to support 24/7 so we wanted to say, you know, during normal of hours, evaporation, Monday through Friday. We hear you could speak to human being. You could call our HR support center. But what happens after hours? What happens on the weekend? What happens on the holiday? And so that was our main idea on how can we bring this digital assistant to our team members that could ask the inquiry, hopefully get good answer, or at least start the conversation and have someone come back to them with the answer.

Trish 18:38
I’m glad you shared that it really addresses a problem. I worked in healthcare in that third shift, for example, they always felt left out. They weren’t being cared for, and you touched on that earlier. So thank you for saying that when you work in healthcare, it is different than working in other industries. And I didn’t realize that until I did as well, because you are caring for people whose sole purpose is to care for other people, right? Who are who are sick or struggling. So it’s very critical to have something, and it’s wonderful to hear how digital assistant, Oracle, digital assistant, helps you do that. 24/7, every day of the week. Because I think that was always the miss from an HR standpoint, is we weren’t there enough, right? So congratulations on the award also, that’s fantastic.

Steve 19:21
Yeah, it’s a fantastic story all around and I remember hearing some of it like in the depths of covid, right? Some of the Northwell Health stories of both on the HR technology side, but also just on the services you’re providing to the community and really, literally, the heroes that work there every day. It was fantastic. Last thing, Alina, before we let you go, what are you most looking forward to over the next day? Day and a half here? Oracle, uh, cloud world. Is there anything? Oh, well, I can’t wait for this. Or is a meeting a new technology demo you want to see a particular person you excited for? What do you think you do? You love Vegas?

Elina Petrillo 19:55
I personally come to a conference to meet old friends and meet new people that doing something interesting that we could learn from. I’m excited about three things. So number one, I brought in a team that’s first time at the Oracle conference that were involved in implementation of the digital assistant, right? And it’s sort of a huge thank you for the work that they’ve done and ability for them to be recognized and celebrated. Second thing is we want to be known as a market leader, so we want people to meet us, to talk to us about what we thinking about innovation that we’re doing, and so I think that’s really important for us to be at the national conferences like this, talking about what we’ve done, talking about how we did it, because that’s important as well, right? And then the third thing is, we implemented Oracle, digital assistant from having conversation like this at the Oracle conference with one of our partners, UPMC, and they told us about the implementation, and in a typical New York fashion, we said, we want that, but we want two times more than that. But I think it’s really important to have that community. And I think it’s especially touching that a lot of healthcare organizations feel this sort of togetherness, where, even though sometimes we compete for business, that we united in our ambition, you know, to continue advocate for, you know, complexities and difficulties in navigating financial markets with Oracle to build that partnership and to you know, continue to stress that innovation is a must in healthcare in order for us to survive, we are mostly non for profit organizations.

Steve 22:00
Yeah. Elina, thank you so much for summarizing that these are great goals, and I think hopefully you’ll achieve all those here over the next couple of days, but it’s been great to meet you. Thank you so much for joining us and sharing your story.

Elina Petrillo 22:12
Yeah, nice meeting you too. Thank you all.

Steve 22:14
Thanks so much to Elina. Thanks so much to Oracle, for having us here. Trish, thank you. For now this has been the HR Happy Hour Show. My name is Steve Boese. Check out all the show archives at hrhappyhour.net, and we’ll see you next time.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai