In this episode of RPI Tech Connect, Adam Luff, Infor’s VP of Healthcare Consulting, shares how ERP solutions are transforming healthcare beyond the back office. Join us to find why advanced ERP tools can enhance workflows, optimize staffing, and improve clinical efficiency to deliver better patient outcomes.
From using AI to predict ER demand to training internal talent, we discuss real-world examples of ERP driving impactful change in healthcare. Plus, see how healthcare can improve the patient experience by learning from other service-based industries like airlines.
Tune in now to learn how technology is bridging the gap between operations and bedside care. All that and more on this episode of RPI Tech Connect.
Interested in listening to this episode on another streaming platform? Check out our directories or watch the YouTube video below.
Meet Today’s Guest, Adam Luff
Adam Luff is a healthcare technology executive and VP of Solution Consulting at Infor. A 25 year veteran of Healthcare Technology, Adam focuses on operational efficiency that leads to providers getting paid faster and simpler.
Meet Your Host, Chris Arey
Chris Arey is an experienced B2B marketing professional with an extensive background in content creation, copywriting, SEO, website architecture, corporate branding, and social media. Beginning his career as an analyst before making a lateral move into marketing, he combines analytical thinking with creative flair—two fundamental principles required in marketing.
With a Bachelor’s degree in English and certifications from the Digital Marketing Institute and HubSpot, Chris has spearheaded impactful content marketing initiatives, participated in corporate re-branding efforts, and collaborated with celebrity influencers. He has also worked with award-winning PR professionals to create unique, compelling campaigns that drove brand recognition and revenue growth for his previous employers.
Chris’ versatility is highlighted by his experience working across different industries, including HR, Tech, SaaS, and Consulting.
About RPI Tech Connect
RPI Tech Connect is the go-to podcast for catching up on the dynamic world of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Join us as we discuss the future of ERPs, covering everything from best practices and organizational change to seamless cloud migration and optimizing applications. Plus, we’ll share predictions and insights of what to expect in the future world of ERPs.
RPI Tech Connect delivers relevant, valuable information in a digestible format. Through candid, genuine conversations and stories from the world of consulting, we aim to provide actionable steps to help you elevate your organization’s ERP. Whether you’re a seasoned professional or new to the ERP scene, our podcast ensures you’re well-equipped for success.
Tune in as we explore tips and tricks in the field of ERP consulting each week and subscribe to RPI Tech Connect below:
Transcript:
Chris Arey
ERP has historically supported back-office functions like finance, supply chain, and HR. But today, it’s playing a critical role in helping healthcare deliver better patient care. Stick around to find out why.
Welcome back to RPI Tech Connect. I’m your host, Chris Arey, and today we’re going to be talking about how healthcare organizations can deliver better patient care through effective resource planning. In this industry, optimizing workflows and staffing isn’t just about improving overall business efficiency; it’s also about making a tangible impact on patients and improving the work environment for clinical staff.
Today, to help explore this topic, I’m pleased to welcome Adam Luff, Infor’s VP of Healthcare Consulting. Adam, welcome to the show.
Adam Luff
Hey, how are you doing Chris? Very happy to be here. My favorite subject.
Chris Arey
Awesome. Yeah. Well, before we get into it, I’m hoping you can share a little bit about your background.
Adam Luff
So yeah, I’ve been in the healthcare space in the United States for a long time and it’s been traditionally ERP, back office, et cetera. But as I’ve matured into the industry, I’ve realized that ERP on its own is back office, it’s keeping score, it’s policy enforcement.
I think the more that people think about: “what could ERP do for me”, the closer you can get to patient care, rev cycle, et cetera, et cetera. It’s just a much better story. And we can impact that as we’re going to discuss today.
Chris Arey
Awesome. Thanks for sharing that with us. And yeah, let’s jump into it. In healthcare, staffing efficiency and workflows, obviously very important, but why do these priorities stand out and how do they have an impact on patient care?
Adam Luff
So this is very timely. Last week, I was at the Becker CIO/CFO conference in Chicago and there were two subjects. One was all about AI, clinical, et cetera, et cetera, and the other was the management of the workforce itself. And to quote a couple of CIOs and CFOs, there are four particular areas, right?
We have the doctors, surgeons, physicians, et cetera, and we don’t touch that.
Nursing is a big thing, anything from RNs, LPNs, anybody that’s bedside providing care.
There are the back-office function people who are running ERP, doing rev cycle, doing supplies, et cetera, et cetera.
And then we have the entry level staff, people that have just joined a hospital system. They may be pushing a gurney. They may be cleaning floors and maybe working in the kitchens, catering, carrying out housekeeping, that sort of thing.
And it was very interesting that they’ve seen that after COVID, the aperture has opened up the lens for people to view inside what really goes on inside a hospital. Before that, people didn’t really realize.
And because of that, we’ve seen a lot of people who left the industry come back, but right now the problem is that there’s still not enough personnel. You look at any hospital’s website, there are hundreds, even thousands of jobs open across the board.
And at the same time, a few weeks ago, I had our top eight customers in our New York office and imagine the scene, right? I had a post-it on a whiteboard, and I wrote out things like efficiency, rev cycle, analytics, profitability, et cetera, et cetera.
I gave all these chaps a red and a green post-it pad. I said, go and put the red ones where you’re having pain, and in the green where you think you’re okay. Seven out of the eight went into efficiency, workflow management and efficiency, doing more with less. The others were analytics, okay, but it’s about doing more with less. And it just fired me up. It really fired me up. I think there’s a lot to talk about here. We can unpack that, right?
Chris Arey
Yeah, what a cool exercise you did there too. I’m sure that didn’t anticipate you telling them go on the board and put your sticker down where you’re feeling the pain the most, so you know they were being honest as well.
Adam Luff
It was. They were a little bit uncomfortable, let’s put it that way, but they got into it.
Chris Arey
That’s how you get to the good stuff.
Adam Luff
Yeah, yeah, they got into it. And then as we talked, it was just apparent that the senior leaders of hospitals, they’re up there in their offices, but they understand that this workforce shortage, the crippling bureaucratic burden that’s put on them by the payers, means that they must respond.
There are also so many things they must do just to get paid. If you ask a hospital’s CFO what they care about, they’ll say ADT. I saw it; they look at every day, wondering: “what am I going to get paid for today?”
There’s a long road to get there: to make sure you diagnose properly, code properly, and get paid properly, whether it’s Medicare or commercial insurance. There’s a lot of work involved, including understanding the cost of the patient encounter-what does it really cost me to do this procedure? And it’s a labyrinth, but we can help.
Chris Arey
Yeah, and that’s what I’m hoping we can maybe talk about this a little bit during our segment today, but you mentioned how an ERP has traditionally been this piece of technology that supports back-end infrastructure; things like finance, supply chain, and HR.
Today it seems like the role of ERP is evolving, particularly in the role of providing patient care. So, I’m wondering, could you maybe provide an example of how this software can support clinicians and improve outcomes?
Adam Luff
Yeah, there are a couple of things that are really prevalent at the moment. The first one is making sure that you have the right people doing the right things at the right time for the patient. Now, everyone has an EMR that completes their orders and everything, but very few EMRs actually plan the whole process of making sure you’ve got the right people bedside; the right nurses with the right qualifications.
As part of our platform, we help with that. We can make sure that a nurse who’s clocked in from her phone, right, she doesn’t have to go and clock in on a machine. She clocks in on her phone and straight away she’s got a schedule for the day.
Chris Arey
Nice.
Adam Luff
Nurses are planned for a day of eight or nine-hour shift of what they’re going to do during that period. For physicians, it’s case-based, so a physician would have five cases to do a day, while a nurse is the opposite end of the spectrum, so we help a lot with that.
Some of the things we do include making sure we’re not going from the second floor to the fifth floor to attend. Just simple things like that. Making sure that the right nurse is qualified and that his or her credentials are valid, that they can actually perform whatever they set out to do.
Then also the other thing we look at in the acuity part of this is; here’s a nurse who is very good bedside in Oncology as an example, because they’re very empathetic, and we can help plan. As a result, nurse leaders don’t have to spend all this time wading through spreadsheet hell.
You talk to any nurse leader, they spend half their shift wading through spreadsheets, figuring out what they’re going to do for that shift and maybe the next shift. And when they do their handover, know, do the shift handover, it’s handing over binders. Man, I mean, come on, this is 2024, right?
Chris Arey
Physical. Yeah.
Adam Luff
Like, what are you going to do, fax them the schedule?
Chris Arey
It’ll be there in seven to ten business days.
Adam Luff
Yeah, exactly. exactly. So that’s a big part of it, but for the people within a hospital, there is the community of care. Here are a couple of statistics for you. AONL conducts a survey every year, and for the last four or five years, the main two reasons why a nurse quits in the first year, regardless of their experience, is one, when they get the wrong paycheck.
Chris Arey
Wow, that’s bad.
Adam Luff
How can that be? Yeah, that’s bad, right? You know, and doing it consistently is even worse. Nurses want to know what they’re getting paid after they clock in on their phone; they don’t want it to be a surprise when they get paid two weeks later.
So that’s a big thing, right, and we fix that. Perfect paycheck is what we do. Here at Infor, we pay about 1.3 million caregivers a week, right? Perfect paycheck. So that’s a big deal.
The second reason that nurses move on is the lack of community within a hospital system. So when you show up on your first day, you may have to spend the first few days onboarding with a hospital using lots of binders, et cetera, et cetera.
We can help with pre-boarding, so that all of that’s done, and when you get to the first shift, you’re ready to roll. So that’s a big deal. The other thing is going back to the whole planning and scheduling of staff is right now, a lot of hospitals, it’s still post-it pads on a board.
“Anyone want to do a shift swap with me? Or, you know, hey Chris, you want to do a shift swap with me?” And that is within your little community. But if you can broaden that community and make it easier to do shift swapping, nurse engagement increases.
When nurse engagement increases, when you fix those two things, retention really, really blossoms. I was talking to a big hospital system last week and they told me that they’ve seen a reduction of 30 % in churn in nursing.
Chris Arey
Wow, that’s significant. That’s over a year’s time?
Adam Luff
Significant right? That is since they went live on Infor, and they attribute that to a lot of things, but the big one is showing that they care right? Remember, nurses, they care, that’s what they do. Making sure they get paid, making sure that the nursing community knows what’s going on, that’s a big deal, right?
Chris Arey
Okay.
Adam Luff
The other thing this hospital told me that just blew my mind was that another part of their platform is running talent science assessments. You complete an online assessment, and it figures out the ways in which your mind works.
They did this on the entry level staff, all of the people that were pushing gurneys around, doing transport, could be janitorial, et cetera. They found that nearly half of the people that they did a subset test on had a propensity to learn more and wanted to stay at the hospital.
So, this is what the hospital did, genius, right? They trained them in phlebotomy, rad tech, lab tech, path tech, et cetera, et cetera.
Now think about that. An employee that feels cared for is going to stay. So they literally wiped out half of their open recs just doing this for the non-clinical care staff. It was amazing. And that just blew my mind. That’s the story I’ve been telling, right? And it’s not hard to do. It’s having the tools to do it, of course, which is what we provide as part of our platform. So that was a cool story.
Chris Arey
Yeah, you know, creating these internal pathways for career development. I can’t think of a better tool for getting people motivated to come to work. And like you said, they’re showing the staff that you care about them. You’re invested in their future and you’re going to try to give them the resources to pursue whatever it is that they’re interested in. That’s a great insight.
Adam Luff
Yeah, yeah. Another example that sprung to mind comes from a big hospital system in New York recently that had around 24,000 nurses. A lot of these nurses start on the day shift, but they may want to move to the evening shift or the night shift due to family commitments, et cetera. Previously, it was almost impossible to find a solution to scheduling problems without a nurse leader waiting for a spreadsheet.
So, we created a questionnaire for them, allowing them to move people around and as a result, they had less no shows on shift. They cut their no shows by like 60%, something like that. That’s the worst thing that can happen; when a nurse informs the hospital that they’re not coming in today for whatever reason. Let’s panic, right?
Chris Arey
Does that happen a lot? Do you know by chance? Is that a common thing?
Adam Luff
It happens more than you would think. Nurses tend to rush around with their hair on fire when this happens, right? Especially because it happens, right? Whatever it may be, kids are sick, or they couldn’t get that shift off, so they’re going to take that day off.
So, then what do you do? You either try and find somebody else, without a system, or you bring in a travel nurse, right? Which is five times the price of a regular.
Chris Arey
Was going to say, it’s probably more expensive.
Adam Luff
Yeah, more expensive. That all goes to helping with the cost of care, but it’s also about caring for the people that work around you. And that’s what I see, hospitals are really focused on that, rather than just the bottom line. They are better places to work for people. They really are. And you feel it when you walk in there. It’s very cool.
Chris Arey
Yeah, I bet. You mentioned something earlier about scheduling and what that process used to look like, what it’s like now. Are Infor or other modern ERPs deploying any kind of functionality for predictive scheduling? Is there AI in there? What can you share?
Adam Luff
Yep. Yeah, we are, we touched on it a bit earlier. The big thing is understanding demand, right? Here’s a good example, right? Big hospital system in Boston, right? They know that when the Bruins or the Red Sox are at home, their ER intake increases, right? Punch ups, fights, people falling over, etc. As opposed to a nurse having to remember that, we can see that peak in demand and so on and so forth.
But the predictive part is the acuity-based scheduling. It’s understanding what nurses are good at, what they’re qualified to do and what they want to do. That’s it. That’s the predictive part. So then when the schedule’s published, you get it on your phone, right? Which is a cool thing; it’s not on a whiteboard in the nurse’s break room where someone might have scrubbed out a name on a post-it pad.
Chris Arey
Sorry!
Adam Luff
And it all just adds up to efficiency. I like to pose the question when I’m talking to nurse leaders: “what’s worse for a nurse, no matter where he or she is in her career, what’s worse, spending two or three hours a shift on admin or spending two or three hours after their shift on admin?”
Chris Arey
Hmm.
Adam Luff
They’re both bad. But once, yeah, yeah. And it’s like, do you pay for those two or three hours after shift? No, but that has to be done.
Chris Arey
Yeah.
Adam Luff
And nurses just want to be bedside giving care. Simple as that. We’ve seen a big uptick in that sort of stuff. And going back to the Becker’s event last week, the predominance of AI, note-taking, having a high percentage prediction on what the outcome will be for that patient, we’re not quite there yet.
Chris Arey
Wow.
Adam Luff
Yeah, we’re not there, but that is top of mind. That’s what they’re thinking about. They’re really thinking about that. If you dial in all the things, the diagnosis, what the nurse is seeing or feeling when she walks into the wardroom, it all adds up to something. All adds up to something. And oftentimes that may take, I don’t know, a few hours, but it can be done, not quite instantaneously, but a lot quicker.
Chris Arey
It sounds like it, yeah. And it seems as though with all this functionality and the way that ERP can be deployed today, it’s reducing a lot of those admin tasks and saving folks time so that they can commit to providing better patient care and being bedside.
Adam Luff
Amen, yeah. So, yeah, another thing we do that nobody ever thinks about is the discharge process. So the physician walks around, does his rounds, and discharges five patients at 9 a.m.
Those people, if they’re a really slick hospital, they’re out of there by 10, but that is very rare. They’re usually sitting around, they’re waiting for their discharge paperwork, you know, seeing what they can and cannot do.
Then you need somebody to move that person, because even if it’s ambulatory care, we always wheel them out to the lobby area so that they’re ready to be picked up. If not, we can order them an Uber, right? We can do that. We actually do that as well, we’ll pre-order the Uber for them.
Chris Arey
Oh wow!
Adam Luff
The other side of that is interesting is that when that room, when that bed becomes empty, you’ve got to get in there, clean the room, change the bed, and turn the room and get it ready, right? Because you know, a cold bed is not earning money in a hospital.
If that discharge takes four, six hours, and then housekeeping shows up, that’s an eight-hour shift gone. Right? And that’s how hospitals think. And nurses also think like that, because they know that there’s always somebody else. That’s just an example of some of the things we do just to boost efficiency, to make life easier!
Chris Arey
I see how all these things you’re mentioning are laddering back up to our initial two priorities here with the efficiency and staffing. So it’s great to see that ERP providers like Infor are really providing the tools to empower clinical staff.
Adam Luff
Yeah, we are and here’s the thing I find that is getting the attention of the operational staff, getting to nursing, right? Once we tell our story, yeah, they’ll want in, but most of the time, the operational staff are dealing with a million invoices a day, with suppliers, et cetera.
Chris Arey
They’re in it.
Adam Luff
All right, so the other part of this, you asked me this earlier, what else are we doing? The other part of this is using AI to predict what is required for procedures, for example.
Chris Arey
Is that like supplies, supplies and stuff?
Adam Luff
Yes. Exactly, supplies, yeah. So you have a preference card, right? If it’s an elective surgery, let’s say they’re doing femoral hernia, something like that. There’s a preference card, right? And that preference card is 30 things, it’s a bill of material. This is what the surgeon wants ready next to him.
And it’s everything from sutures to instruments and cutting tools, everything, okay? He wants that there. When the lab techs are rushing around the night before, because that’s what happens on the night shift, if stuff is not there, one of two things happens, right?
They’re either rushing around to try and find it in the hospital, or if they’re in a hospital system in a city, they’re driving across town to pick something up, right? Last thing they want to do.
Chris Arey
Yeah, I don’t want that.
Adam Luff
Yeah, yeah, pain, right? The worst thing is canceling the procedure. Yeah, because of lost revenue, right? It’s revenue. And we help with that.
We can look into the EMR, take that order, unpack it and understand what’s needed, not just from the supply, but also scheduling, right? We talked a lot about scheduling nurses. That applies to OR as well.
Those are the two things that I see really predominantly top of mind for people in healthcare now. Supplies; buying properly, buying at the right time, making sure it’s on the shelf.
Most nurses you speak to will tell you that the first thing they do is go into the store and stuff their pockets with gear. First thing I do. And we plan for that. We help plan for that. Right.
I just stuff my pockets with gear because I know that I haven’t got time to run about, it’s with me. It’s with me. Yeah. And we plan for that. We help plan for that. Right.
Chris Arey
This inventory intelligence you’re talking about here, are nurses able to see where in the hospital these supplies are being stored? So, it’s easy to go and get them and they can guarantee when they get to that room, X, Y, and Z will be there?
Adam Luff
Yeah, so here’s a story. One of our hospitals up in Montana, Yellowstone country, they deployed our application. These are community hospitals, maybe 20, 30 beds right in the middle of nowhere.
They have a supplies room, but there’s a nurse who needs a Belmont tube at 2 a.m. These are the sorts of things needed for an emergency case.
Instead of having to go in the room saying: “my God, where is it” they ask Siri: “where is my Belmont tube?” Then, they’re quickly able to find it, and the software removes it from the inventory so that a restock can be planned. Yeah, little things like that.
Chris Arey
Wow. So there’s voice assistant capability in the Infor app.
Adam Luff
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah.
Chris Arey
Oh very cool. Especially in a space like a healthcare organization’s facility, you’ve probably got gloves on along with other personal protective equipment. It’s much easier to simply speak into your phone than it is to take off your gloves, clean up your hands and type it in on your phone. Much easier than going to search for a computer that’s not in use.
Adam Luff
Bingo. Yeah, yeah.
Chris
That’s awesome. Really meeting them where they are there.
Adam Luff
Bingo. Yeah, yeah. One of the hospital systems I spoke to recently made the same comment about wearing gloves and wondering how they would activate it. This is what they did: they put an app on the phone so they can just tap their nose to access the voice assistant. Tap it, speak, done. Little things like that.
Chris Arey
Nice. Yeah, that’s really cool. It’s nose activated, you said, huh?
Adam Luff
Yeah, you know, things like that are what I love to do. Listen, you know, we can solve these problems, and we know a lot about them. Come to us, and we will help you solve some of these problems.
Our platform is broad, it does all the ERP stuff as we mentioned, you know, supplies, finance, et cetera. The common finance joke is: “why should it take me all month to do my monthly reporting?” Not with us, you can get to a weekly close, right?
Chris Arey
Haha.
Adam Luff
And then the other part is the interoperability, which is getting information from your EMR. Question for you, Chris, when somebody is admitted into a hospital, how many messages are created from that EMR that go to all these different places in the hospital? Like, you know, they go to the phlebotomy or lab or path. Have a guess.
Chris Arey
I guess it maybe depends on the severity of the patient, but I don’t know, maybe 10?
Adam Luff
It’s around 25 to 45 messages, and those are just so that when you go to pharmacy, that patient exists in the pharmacy record so they can dispense medications.
And people don’t think about that, right? People don’t think about that.
Chris Arey
No, I certainly didn’t. And now that you’ve told me, any time I go into a hospital in the future, I’m going to be wondering just how much is going on in the back end that I don’t know about.
Adam Luff
So we process over a billion messages a day on our cloud platform in hospitals in North America. The biggest one is HCA with around 750 million messages a day, right?
Think about that, how many people, admissions. So, it’s an AD or a T, right? Admission, discharge or transfer. That’s a set of messages that are created that happens so that they can administer, because, ultimately, remember what hospitals all are about: getting paid.
All of this adds up to getting paid better, getting paid faster. All right? That’s the gig. That’s the deal, sadly, in North America.
Chris Arey
Yeah. Well, I appreciate you being candid there. It’s true. And being honest is important and transparent. So thank you. We’re getting close to time.
Before we wrap up, I like to ask my guests if they could impart one actionable takeaway for the audience, what would it be?
If so, I’d love to hear if you’ve got one bit for us, what would you share?
Adam Luff
Sure. Technology is everywhere. And think of industries that have embraced technology to solve complex human interactions, such as airlines, right?
You check in, you get everything on your phone done, Hospitals need to start thinking like that.
That’s what they need to start. Think about your patient, not as a passenger, obviously, but think about that patient centric experience. Yeah.
Think about that, there’s always a way to make the journey better for a patient. You make the journey better for a patient, you make it better for the caregivers, everything else just falls into place.
And that’s my challenge when I go and talk to execs, is that, can’t you do? And they’ll always talk about, well, I can’t do analytics, I can’t do reporting. said, great, if you had better analytics and reporting,
What problems would you solve?
Chris Arey
Yeah. What would you do with them? Take it a step further there-it’s not enough just to get the data and the reporting. Like you need to do something with it. Brilliant.
Adam Luff
Yeah, what’s your pain? What’s your pain. And that’s it. That’s healthcare in a nutshell in North America, right?
Chris Arey
Well, thank you for sharing that, Adam. I love that. I’m definitely going to share your last anecdote with my colleagues here at RPI.
For those of you listening in today, if you have any questions about today’s segment or want to learn more about how ERP can help your healthcare organizations, we’d love to hear from you.
You can contact us at podcast@rpic.com. Again, that’s podcast@rpic.com. This is RPI Tech Connect, and we’ll see you next time. Thank you, Adam.
