Oracle Guided Learning Accelerates Adoption and Reduces Training Costs in Guthrie Clinic’s Transition to Oracle Cloud
The Guthrie Clinic is a five hospital system operating in Pennsylvania and New York. It is a large network of hospitals and clinics, with approximately 7,000 employees, including 500 doctors and advanced practitioners. Their facilities include a tier one trauma center and helipads, servicing patients flown in from the surrounding areas. Guthrie treats nearly a million patients a year.
With Guthrie’s growing hospital system, they knew they needed to initiate a digital transformation of their systems, in order to continue to deliver the highest level of care for their patients. To do that, Guthrie decided to move their ERP and HCM systems to Oracle Cloud. As part of Guthrie’s cloud strategy, the organization wanted to make the adoption of the new technologies as smooth and as swift as possible. In that regard, one of the selling points which prompted Guthrie to choose Oracle’s cloud products was Oracle University’s Guided Learning (OGL).
Adopting Modern Business Practices
The adoption of Oracle Cloud products required developing and adopting new business practices. This resulted in the concern that the automation of processes may eliminate the need for some roles within the organization. Rather, Guthrie leveraged the opportunity to reskill and upskill those employees for higher value and more satisfying work. Guthrie embraced training employees on modern cloud technology as an important part of the migration process. Therefore, Guthrie began to focus not only on gaps in skill sets, but also on their ability to provide their employees with efficient training programs, to help them adapt to the future with the modern business practices.
Getting It Right from the Start
At the beginning of the process, Guthrie and education experts from Oracle University partnered to conduct a business process overview and a value assessment. The team saw that Guthrie had some systems that did not communicate with each other, and manual processes using paper and spreadsheets were used to fill the gaps. It would not do to provide employees with advanced solutions. The experts from both companies agreed that Guthrie Clinic needed to change their business process and modernize the workflow, along with the new technology.
In this respect, “Oracle Guided Learning alleviated a lot of the pressure from our organization to have to execute on a training program,” said Paul Contino, Vice President of Information Technology, “and when we did our internal calculations, we found it would be two to three times the cost of what it would be to implement Oracle Guided Learning.”
Training a team to roll out training for Guthrie’s employees and then support and maintain their proficiency with each and every quarterly cloud update, simply did not make sense. Contino adds, “Because the Oracle Guided Learning team works hand-in-hand with application development, you know exactly what updates are coming with each and every cloud release. So by using Oracle Guided Learning, we didn’t have to get in the middle of that and try to update training materials ourselves.”
Improving User Adoption with Oracle Guided Learning
Oracle University offers Guided Learning as a managed service whereby its experts take on the responsibility for making updates to the product with every cloud release, at the time of the launch, saving Guthrie the time and expense of doing it themselves. Because Oracle University’s team is in lock-step with Oracle product development, they know exactly what is product updates are occurring, leaving no gaps or disconnects between updates. Additionally, OGL is served up right within the SaaS application and guidance is given within the workflow, exactly when and where the employee needs it. As a result, employees learn while working.
“In the end,” as Contino put it, “Oracle Guided Learning was a real differentiator for us. And truthfully, I wish other vendors would use that same model, because it makes so much sense to have people in the product, using the workflow and being guided through as they go. That is how a modern workflow is executed. So in the end, it was a no brainer for us.”