In 2013, Legacy Baylor and Scott & White announced their merger. The new organization would include $9.7 billion in total assets, 40,000 employees, 10.2 million annual patient encounters and 48 hospitals. Combining these two entities into one HR would be an incredible challenge, and the team knew data and analytics served an essential role in the process.

Historically, these two powerhouse healthcare systems performed business functions in opposing ways. Legacy Baylor operated with a business-focused culture and outsourced all HR systems to an outside agency. Scott & White operated with a physician-led culture and used a thinly staffed IT team for internal HR systems.

Determined to lead through data and analytics in the cloud, the implementation team kept three goals in mind:

1. Accurate and timely payroll with one set of processes, policies and a single enabling technology platform
2. Enhance employee and manager engagement
3. Create engaging technologies to support business objectives

The newly formed Baylor Scott & White committed to a data and analytics methodology foundation built on three strategies:

• Iterative approach
• Collaboration drives user adoption
• Knowledge transfer ensures long-term success

Important steps in the new system included report rationalization, data conversion, system integration, gap analysis, analytics and reporting strategy, and the importance of usability. The team knew they should go where the traffic already was (instead of driving traffic somewhere new) and keep clicks to a minimum in order to generate the most user adoption. Their carefully thought-out analytics strategy answered five questions:

1. Who needs the data?
2. What are their data needs?
3. Where is the data?
4. How will they get the data?
5. How do we deliver what they need?

After answering these questions, the team prepared to level up the “out of the box” materials. Based on actual leader workflows and use cases, this was the focal point for leaders to pull people data. Leveling up reduced implementation costs by starting with the multitude of delivered data sources, improving operational efficiency through timely information and alerts, and creating more time for value-added actions via a transactional support tool.

The team also found value in leveraging the data lake. They generated historical documents such as pay stubs and W2 forms from archived data in real time and empowered HRBP/HR CoE teams to pull from the archive. The benefits of the data lake included reducing implementation costs by simplifying conversion requirements, reducing operational risk by providing HR team members easy access to historical data, and reducing compliance concerns by creating historical documents ready for audit.

Lastly, the team prioritized position control. Position control takes insight to action by bringing together recruiting, retention, financial, and productivity information to make more informed staffing decisions and approve job requisitions from the dashboard. This endeavor reduced financial risk by providing tools to forecast future budget impacts of a hire, shortened talent acquisition cycle through process automation, and empowered leaders with macro and micro views into organizational productivity and financials for improved staffing decisions.

The next phase includes providing timely focus by only showing the “trending now”section graphically on the dashboard, providing simple access to data by displaying consistent data extract reports, and creating a proactive alerts library which will display very personalized data alerts across many data sources.

Overall, the Baylor Scott & White team feels empowered to make better business decisions due to their data and analytics strategy. Employees celebrate their ability to view departments at a granular level, shown through patient satisfaction information, quality scores, financial measures, and people measures.

To learn how to build your own strategy, watch the Baylor Scott & White demo here.