Name: The CIO Perspective on Evaluating AI for The Back Office
Uploaded: 2025-12-11T18:41:09.331Z
Duration: 23 min 56 s
Description: The CIO Perspective on Evaluating AI for The Back Office

Transcript for "The CIO Perspective on Evaluating AI for The Back Office": Hello. Welcome, everyone. Today, we're we're privileged to, get to have an interview and a discussion with, one of our our customers of Workday and the health care community, Terry Ripley, the CIO, from, OrthoVirginia, and, we're going to discuss, perspective on the back office and and transformation. Just by way of introduction, my name is Brent Moll. I'm a enterprise architect at Workday and have been here for a little over ten years and, with a background in ERP and other ERP systems, but I get to focus on health care for, most of my career here at Workday and love meeting our customers. And, Terry, would you, mind introducing yourself? Hello. I'm Terry Ripley, chief information officer at OrthoVirginia, and I've been in health IT for almost forty years working in hospital systems, consulting. I really liked health care and I thought hospitals is where I wanted to stay, but I got the bigger the systems got, the further I got away from the physicians. So OrthoVirginia, I've been at for almost eight years and I'm definitely close to my positions now. So I'm where I where I asked to be. That's that's that's fantastic. Close to the mission. And, just to kind of, may maybe, Terry, I'll let you just kinda describe OrthoVirginia, a little bit. We're we're proud that you're a customer. Customer number 15313. Yes. We actually go live with Workday HR, December 21, and financial supply chain, January 1. Excited about it. OrthoVirginia has grown from independent individual independent practices to a large organization. We see a million patient visits a year. We do about 55,000 surgeries per year. So we have urgent care centers, orthopedic care, operatories, and therapy. 2,200 employees and we are spread out across the entire state. Live in the middle and it's four or five hours to reach each location on the outside of the parameters. Virginia is a beautiful state, and so you have a a wide area of coverage. And, yeah, it's important just to appreciate that your your scale, with 2,200 employees and a 160 physicians across 36 locations, I believe. Yes. And those positions are actually shareholders in the organization, which definitely makes the relationship a little bit different. Yeah. Yeah. Let's let's talk about that a little bit later for sure. That's an interesting factor. Just as far as your product set, like most of our health care customers, it's full platform with, Workday financials and supply chain included in there, HCM planning, and Workday success plans. So, well, let's dive into our discussion. I have a a few questions I just wanted to to ask you to comment on and and respond to, Terry, just from your perspective. So you you've already given us kind of a a sense of the scale of OrthoVirginia that, you know, you're not just a single site. On your website, front, front and proper, and it's an interesting website, orthovirginia.com. It is I love seeing the the photos that are there, but, your tagline is strong stronger starts here. So that's a it's somewhat of a a promise to your patients to get back to their active lives. How how do you see IT and back office functions contributing toward that promise? It it's critical. Right? So we are heavy on the clinician side but the clinicians can't do their job taking care of the patients if we don't run a smooth office. So we had a problem. We had more patients than we had therapists. Well, being able to use the HR system to bring in physical therapist quickly, the onboarding, the training, all of that is critical. We're looking at automation and things. We're trying to make sure that the admin staff we have are working smarter not harder so we can get more done Mhmm. so, and it's really great to see a lot of our patients come in a little older even my mom. Right? She and she really wasn't moving much with before she had surgery. She hadn't realized she was sitting. She's in her eighties and she had a knee replacement, went through our therapy program. She is shopping and driving and running up and down the roads just enjoying life again. So it is so rewarding to be able to see really being able to get the patient stronger and our jobs to make sure they have the tools they need to be more efficient and make it happen. We're we're excited for your go live so that Workday can help you realize that. You you made the decision to invest in the full Workday platform, HCM Finance supply chain. What what was kind of the tipping point to help help you reach that decision, you know, if you looked at your current systems and the problem of of achieving your mission? We were running this organization on spreadsheets. Okay? We were making decisions. We actually had a problem with temp labor. We've gone over budget, but it was six weeks after and we'd already signed contracts because we couldn't see that coming. So really getting a single point of truth, being able to combine the HR, the financial, oh, and the supplies, operatories. We have three different operatories and operating rooms. Patients after COVID want to come in to our offices at our operatories to be able to have surgery. Well, if we're not able to track those implant cost, the supply cost, if we're not able to have all that in and we actually got what we were trying to run epics really good. We have epic. We were running reports on implants but we don't have the real cost data. So the minute we showed that data to the physicians, they said it's not right and they walked away. So that's probably was the biggest driver that pushed us over is when the physicians, we couldn't tell them the story on which implants were more cost efficient to use and really to try to help change behavior. The minute they looked at data and couldn't accept it, it was bad. Yeah. So had the the revenue side, but not the cost story to calculate margin. So, yeah, great. That, yeah, that I can see that being a tipping point, in in the decision. So we're glad you chose Workday. As part of your decision process, how much were you thinking about AI and, a road map of AI for your vendor? Was it was it a nice to have, or was it something that you thought might kind of future proof your ERP decision? It was a must have. We're an epic for our EHR and we were looking for a partner who could help. We didn't want to have to go about one off vendors to be able to get AI. AI is the the promise right it's gonna help more with efficiency it's gonna help get things done so we needed to make sure we were selecting an ERP vendor that had that functionality and that we could grow and make use of it as it was coming available. We know everything's not ready yet but we look at them and if we don't have it, we're not gonna be able to keep up with the cost. People are expensive. Right? Benefits, training, Mhmm. and so anything we can do to automate. So we were making sure. That was one of my big questions. Yeah. And and, of course, staffing is a challenge, to and so, that's that's great that you were thinking about that two, three years ago when you were embarking upon your decision. Now you're, I guess, a year almost at the end of your deployment, so it's exciting you'll have that. You're you're you mentioned growing growth. That's accomplished through partnerships and mergers. Can you speak to the importance of a single source of truth of of your data across so many different organizations coming together? So trying to make sure there's a good fit with bringing a partner in. Right? We brought a couple practices in based on gut feel. We're too big for that. Right? We need to be able to check. We need to be able to tell the level of effort our doctors are working, what the cost is, we need to be able to tell what our payer mix, what the new providers coming in. So we've got very thoughtful planned process there for reviewing that and as soon as we have work day we'll be able to fill that because, we don't have it now like I said managing the company our size on spreadsheets and trying to it's more than spreadsheets but that's that's what the end result is and that's what all the time is spent with our finance team is manipulating spreadsheets for people to understand it. We need to do the financial planning. We wanna get to rolling budgets. Right? All these things that we know we need to do to keep our company running efficiently. So, yeah, you you're you're kind of at the at the the blank slate stage where, you you've been designing your new system, how it's going to process. When you talk about data, then the what about the processes of of that data? How how are you thinking about automation and taking advantage of those things in in Workday versus what you may have been attempting before? Well, we talked about operatories, item master, supplies, getting those in sync between the systems are critical. Looking for that. The automation with invoices, we currently have people who look at invoices, they approve or manually. Right? There's no three way matching and today, the bad guys, we've even gotten invoices that weren't ours that almost got approved because we didn't have those tools. We didn't have the automation. People make mistakes. If you have three way matching, you have it signed up and they match, that's good to go. You don't need a human to look at it and make a poor decision that could cost us money. Yeah. That's, hopefully, gonna save time and, keep keep things moving in a in a governed way. That's that's one example of of kind of changing the administrative burden day to day for for your administrators, and your admin staff. For your physicians, are there are there benefits there you're expecting them to realize administratively on a day to day They're shareholders, basis? so they care about the cost of the company and expense. So they're very excited about the automation, the AI that can help the efficiency and hopefully not have to hire new people as we grow to get things done. But in the operatories those cost that data that we have in the dashboards with epic once we can get real cost data, they're very competitive. If doctor a over here is doing a knee replacement surgery and the expense to the company is x and doctor y over here is much higher, we're gonna be very transparent about that so they can see. So hopefully, we want the best quality Mhmm. but some of the same quality are more expensive and we just don't have that transparency there with. today, January 1. And also the financials, our doctors care a great deal about where we are and using Workday, we're gonna be able to get reports back out sooner. They more easy to understand. They're easy for the docs to use. It's not gonna be so much hand holding. So the clarity of the data that we see in workday is just so much better. So then the doctors will continue to trust us and quit asking. Yeah. What what's your team been doing? Can can you kind of describe the data cleansing and prep process, to get it ready for the new ERP? Yeah. The item master, the supply file, the financials, we're really working to make sure it fits what we're doing today but it is also structured that we can continue to grow. Clean up, we've gotten rid of duplicates, and we've gotten our process so we're checking better so that we won't get in the shape. Our item master and supply master probably at least four times bigger than it should have been because of duplicates so we've cleaned that up and like I said, we've got the processes to keep it that way and keep it in sync with epics so that we can have that transparency between the systems. One one aspect as a technologist, that I I have is dear near dear to my heart is security. And, so as you think about security and governance, and you approach that, how do you feel like Workday is going to impact or hopefully improve your posture for compliance and data privacy? Before we got our new CFO, our old, I had even taken at our cyber risk assessment each year picked our financial system. It has PHI, thanks to patient refunds, all servers that were in our data center, database systems that couldn't get updated and take patches. You try to patch and it would break the system. There was downtime, and you've got all this data that people are pulling out into excel format so that's enough that kept me up at night so I'm very excited about Workday. I'm very excited about the cloud technology. I'm very excited about the ability to limit what data is available to who so that we don't have these risks. And my outside cyber security risk assessors were very happy to hear where we're going work day too. Yeah. We we hear that, auditors love Workday, Yeah, but it's a little bit easier for them to get the answers that they want. Hopefully, they get out of your air more quickly as a result. So But sure don't want that risk, you know. I mean, it it's getting a clean audit, but that's patient data in there that could have gotten out and that's just hard to recover from. yeah. Yeah. You have a, a diverse workforce of of surgeons who are shareholders and then administrative staff and probably quite a bit of turnover at some of the lower levels, you know, as much as you can, eliminate that or prevent that. But, but it's AI will have an impact. And, so it's not just automation and cleaner data, better visibility, but the impact of AI. How are you kind of considering the human element of transformation? How are you preparing them for upcoming changes from an AI perspective? So it's different audience, so it's a different message. With the shareholders, it was very much that AI is coming. It's gonna help us work smarter, be more efficient, and correct errors. Right? It it's really gonna help us be better. Now when we get to the team that's actually using it, it's this is gonna help you work smarter. It's gonna be able to help us grow and give you the tools that you need. It is cautious because anytime you do AI you've got to learn it's it's not like it's always right you've got to learn to look at it use it so we're trying to help the leaders of the area to understand it's very good understand it right take chances learn it and then let's incorporate it and bring everyone along We really change management for work days been very different than anything else we've done in the organization. So how you tell the story and how many different ways we've been telling the story we're going work day for months now, But now that we're doing the training, it's very scripted. They understand it. There's a lot of excitement. The work day mobile app. Oh my gosh. For someone who is transient is our team is the fact that you can do some but that was one place that our HR team they were afraid they didn't want to turn the functionality on. Right. They said we didn't test it and I was like, well, hold on. Hold on. Calm down. We got there But that is such a huge benefit for us when you're not, you know, my office is actually two and a half hours away so me at my computer there is not very often, you know, once or twice a month, but I've got a laptop, but I've got always got my mobile device in hand. So we're really excited about that. And that got all of our employees really excited too. Today, they have to approve time. They have to go home, sign in, Oh, and? do it all. Right. So I mean, you just didn't even think about the length of time that we're having to do things now that workdays just gonna go bam and it's improved. Fantastic. That's great to hear. We we have a number of IT leaders represented in our audience today from from different customers. If there are other CIOs, IT leaders who are kind of in the midst of of preparing for a switch or a change or considering Workday, Do you have any advice for helping them, in their RFPs, what questions they might ask, whether it's about AI or services or partners or anything else that, from your perspective, you would like to share? I think the data availability is something everybody needs to stress because we all the right data in the right hands to make decisions are getting more and more important. Making sure in the r p you cover if they have mobile or not because everybody wants to get things done more. Security, have your security risk assessment right. Make sure you do that when you do an RFP. Looking at Workday or someone else, you want to make sure you've done that, and the AI roadmap, have that conversation, find out what they're planning to do with AI. It is the future. It all doesn't work smoothly now but you've got to make sure you've got a vendor that's gonna help you get where we need to tomorrow too. Yeah. Those are great insights. And I'll just say personally, if you do have a a security assessment, send it to your vendor early. I have to answer some of those, and I hate to get them at the last minute. It's under pressure. So those are tricky questions that take time. So, yeah, send those early to your vendor. Yeah. I see the comment train train train yes. Train tip sheets. We've got a work day hub, make it easy for people to find that information that they need. Great great comment. It sounds like transformation is gonna be really impactful for OrthoVirginia. We're we're excited that I mean, just to to hear about the outcome. We've got a couple minutes left. Maybe we could, open it up and take some questions from our audience as if there's anything you'd like to ask Terry from her perspective, might suggest that go ahead and put those questions into the q and a, and, we'll we'll try to address those. And then immediately after this call, I will be, going a little bit deeper into agents, following up on what Dan Wesley, introduced earlier in our sessions today. So, you're welcome to join us in that section. Do we have any other questions? Anything else you would like to to talk about or or mention, Terry, from your perspective? I'm just so excited to be moving to a more modern system that's gonna give us the ability to really transform our organization. Getting the right data in front of people, being in that cost data for our surgeons. We wanna keep getting better, and I'm so glad that we're equipped with Workday that's gonna help us get there. And hiring people quicker. So that that's another thing, the onboarding stuff and the elearning and all that. So we're really, excited. When have shift, sometimes you have to bring people in really quick, and having those right tools are important. a we're excited for you. We have a fantastic, community of health care customers who collaborate richly as we are able to do Hysop today, and, we're glad you'll be continue to be a part of that community and and, and, hope hope you benefit and contribute again. We'll we'll wrap it up, unless there were any other questions. I did not see any specific questions come in from our audience, but thank you all for joining. Thank you, Terry, for your time and your perspective and your investment in Workday, and and, we look forward to further collaboration. I'll go ahead and and, end our session here and, hopefully, see you at the next one. Thank you, Thank. you.