Oracle: Transforming Care Delivery with Atlantic Health

Driving change in the healthcare industry requires a dedicated focus on the quality of the patient experience.

According to Lisa Gulker, chief nursing officer of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, the success of a healthcare organisation depends on connecting operational transformations directly to patient care. 

“Organisations understand that back-office operations aren’t separate and distinct from care delivery,” Gulker says. “When I worked on the front lines in healthcare, I relied on strong operational support to help deliver safe, efficient and high-quality care for patients every single day. 

“Whether we’re talking about staffing, scheduling, supply chain, finance or even the employee experience, those operational functions directly impact an organisation’s ability to achieve its strategic goals.”

Unifying disconnected systems

Despite these systems being critical for running a healthcare organisation, business and clinical operations have historically been separated. 

“Disconnected systems create inefficiencies that directly affect the patient experience ,” Gulker says. 

Oracle Health and Life Sciences addresses this head-on by connecting clinical and enterprise applications.

By unifying these applications on an AI-powered platform, organisations can align staffing and supplies with near real-time clinical demand. 

“That gives us a capability set that most offerings in the market don’t have,” Gulker says. “Now, decision-making and execution become much more achievable. Leaders have better visibility into workforce capacity, patient throughput and operational readiness.

“If operations are running smoothly, then clinicians can focus on the reason they came to work, which is to take care of patients.”

Reducing fragmentation 

The success of Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, Oracle’s enterprise suite, can be seen through the company’s continued collaboration with Atlantic Health.

“One of the key outcomes of this collaboration has been reducing fragmentation for Atlantic Health,” Gulker says. “We’ve helped replace highly manual processes with more streamlined workflows, so now the organisation has a much more unified experience.”

This includes a significant reduction in payroll costs by eliminating more than 90% of on-site check printing, as well as saving meaningful administrative time through payroll automation.

“They’ve been able to show some really amazing operational improvement,” Gulker says. “We’ve created this more connected and efficient environment that supports the workforce delivering patient care every day.”

Relieving administrative burden

Oracle and Atlantic Health’s collaboration continues to evolve, with a focus on the development of intelligent automation. 

Current initiatives include a purchase order AI receiving agent, which Gulker says  is designed to automate purchase order receipt processing.

“Processes that used to be manual  can now be done by an AI agent in a coordinated way,” Gulker says. “Again, this relieves administrative burden and speeds up the entire process – so the manual effort required from operational teams is greatly reduced.”

Oracle is also exploring a benefits and absence hybrid agent to provide employees with 24/7 support for benefits and absence-related questions, and reduce pressure on HR teams. 

“That’s all part of improving the employee experience and empowering employees to find the answers they need when they need them.” Gulker says. “These aren’t isolated technology projects, but part of a broader transformation happening across healthcare.”

“Operational transformation and clinical transformation go hand in hand,” she says. “The organisations that will be the most successful are those that connect this intelligence in a way that both improves care delivery and treats employees like the valuable resource they are.”