At Nemours Children's Health, keeping kids healthy takes strong technology

Nemours Children’s Health is one of the largest pediatric healthcare systems in the U.S., with more than 8,000 associates caring for more than 480,000 kids a year in two free-standing children’s hospitals in Wilmington, Delaware, and Orlando, Florida, and in 72 primary and specialty care practices.

It all started in 1936 when philanthropist Alfred I. duPont bequeathed his estate for the creation of the Nemours Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to improving children’s health.

Nemours delivers what Associate CIO Jackie Gustafson calls “the full package,” going beyond clinical care to focus on kids’ emotional well-being, family dynamics, education, and more. Its kidshealth.org site is one of the most-searched global sources for information on children’s health.

While Nemours is a rewarding place to work, as it grew to triple its revenue, almost quadruple its physical space, and continue to add staff, its HR systems became complex, with information scattered across multiple portals, making it difficult for associates to find what they needed.

By 2018, Nemours had two aging ERP platforms, one of them due to be retired. The other ERP platform housed the organization’s human capital management suite. Interfaces between the two platforms grew increasingly complicated, and the cost of supporting both was steadily rising.

“We needed a single enterprise ERP platform to simplify our systems,” says Bernie Rice, senior vice president and chief information officer, Nemours Children's. That meant moving Nemours’ on-premises applications to applications living on a centralized cloud.

Rice and Gustafson worked with consultants at Gartner to evaluate 11 ERP suites. After thorough vetting, they chose an integrated suite of Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP and Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM.

“We liked that Oracle owns the whole stack, whether it’s the hardware we run on, the database, or the data centers. That gives Oracle insight others don’t have if they’re running their systems in somebody else’s database or operating system. We were also very impressed with Oracle’s security design.”

Nemours went live on Oracle Cloud HCM in April. Payroll launched this past January and ERP systems including finance and supply chain will follow this fall.

“We’ve started to offer one-stop shopping for our end users,” Gustafson says. “For instance, frontline users can now securely access pay stubs from anywhere, and they’re available in real time.”

Handling employee reviews and performance management is also faster and easier. Before, Nemours used a custom application that wasn’t integrated.

“Now, we have performance goals and everything else all on one screen,” Rice says. “I can click on Jackie’s goals, and we can do a quick check-in. Things are more integrated, and because I can use my phone or laptop, they’re much more convenient.”

With telecommuting surging, the new platform also helps Nemours manage remote workers, such as identifying which states they’re in and knowing they have the equipment and tech support required to do their jobs.

Other improvements will happen soon, for instance, automating the onboarding process. From the moment people accept a job, the system will convert them from candidate to associate, reserve an email address and user ID, schedule required training. Those steps are currently manual and can take a couple of days.

Gustafson puts it this way: “Our job is to make it easier for our care providers to do their jobs.”