For most healthcare providers, the pandemic’s early days stretched the limits of their capabilities for care, with many struggling with staffing strategies in response to COVID-19. But for Northwell Health, a major healthcare provider in and around New York City, those initial weeks also stress-tested an ongoing HR system migration, resulting in innovative features the provider hadn’t planned for before the pandemic hit.
Northwell’s HR transformation began in early 2018, when the provider sought to replace the PeopleSoft system it used to manage its 74,000 staff providing care in Manhattan, Staten Island, Queens and nearby Westchester.
“PeopleSoft felt like an end-of-life product that was not meeting our business objectives,” says Elina Petrillo, Northwell’s assistant vice president for HR technology. Among those objectives: to provide a better, self-service experience for staff and management, replete with up-to-date dashboards, extensive and efficient, and capable of providing access to the data it held, making it not just a system of record but a tool for analysis and improvement, she says.
“We had brought in another vendor to do an overlay on PeopleSoft to make it more friendly, and made a couple of transactions mobile-aware, but it was still very limited in the number of transactions that you could perform and in the experience itself,” Petrillo says, adding that there also were issues integrating Northwell’s recruitment platform, Taleo, with PeopleSoft.
Despite the difficulties Northwell was experiencing with PeopleSoft and Taleo, both Oracle products, Northwell chose Oracle’s HCM Cloud as their replacement.
