St John of God Health Care shrinks size of its application estate

St John of God Health Care has shrunk the size of its application estate by over a hundred in the past two years as part of an ongoing simplification effort.

St John of God Health Care's Sidone Thomas.

Chief technology and corporate services officer Sidone Thomas told the recent Workday Elevate summit that the not-for-profit operator of 25 health facilities had invested focus and effort into “integration, simplification, automation, and trying to get the right information to the right person at the right time.”

The healthcare services provider has reduced the number of applications in its environment.

“Anyone who is in health … will know we have a point solution for every problem that's in health, so we support a huge amount of systems across our portfolio,” Thomas said.

“I've been with St John of God [for] two years now, and we've spent a lot of our time about consolidation. 

“We've probably taken over a hundred applications out of the business already, [although] let me assure there's still hundreds and hundreds to go.” 

St John of God has also deployed Workday to remove paper-based HR administration and to improve the employment experience for frontline care workers, with the aim of enabling staff to spend more quality time with patients rather than on admin.

The use of Workday is intended to give caregivers a good experience from the time they join the organisation.

Workday, according to staff pages on the St John of God website, is the organisation’s “human resources information system that allows you to easily view and update caregiver personal information, view your payslips and request leave bookings (for relevant services/ sites).”

Learning and development goals can also be managed by staff via Workday.

Having all HR-related functionality available in a single platform was beneficial for the caregiver experience, Thomas said.

She indicated that there is room to further optimise HR processes in Workday so that they required “a few less touches” by staff.