University of Florida Health/Shands Healthcare, in conjunction with their partner SmartERP, has selectively adopted several PeopleSoft-delivered features such as benefits open enrollment, travel and expense updates, payroll quick calc, and enhancements to cover letter attachments. Additionally, they have adopted several features in PeopleSoft Employee Health & Safety module to respond quickly to Covid-19 pandemic. Delivered PeopleSoft functionality has helped them minimize manual effort.
University of Florida Health, in conjunction with their partner SmartERP, was previously recognized for deploying Elasticsearch during their recent HCM 9.2 / PeopleTools 8.55 Upgrade project, enabling the organization to successfully deploy PeopleSoft Fluid Candidate Gateway with powerful search capabilities in support of new hospitals and more than 1,000 open positions to fill.
PeopleSoft initiatives have made our customers', IT staff’s and business analysts' lives so much easier, freeing them up to design new innovations using the tools PeopleSoft so adeptly provides. Also, with an aging workforce amongst the mergers and acquisitions in 2022, we could not have done it without selective adoption and the health and safety tracking and reporting.
Since its inception, leveraging selective adoption when work is too busy to handle it all has been a godsend to University of Florida Health/Shands Healthcare users. University of Florida Health/Shands Healthcare stays as current as possible on PUM images, but there is so much to choose from. Amidst recent mergers and acquisitions, along with resource constraints, selection adoption has made staying current easily doable. For example, in 2022, necessary tax updates and open enrollment patches were a must in order to remain compliant with the IRS, as well as to make sure benefits open enrollment ran seamlessly for a constantly expanding employee base. Additionally, delivered travel and expense updates were required and selected to enhance the employee experience. Another example is quick calc functionality for payroll. This was specifically requested by our Payroll Manager and has provided much welcome assistance to payroll personnel. The final example, special characters in resume and cover letter attachments, was a fix we really appreciated.
Nothing has been more on the forefront for hospitals these days than their Covid-19 response. These past couple of years have by far surpassed all others in terms of the need to manage and respond quickly to health and wellness statistics within our multiple organizations. Since January 2022, University of Florida Health/Shands Healthcare has worked to improve its usage of the PeopleSoft Employee Health and Safety module to track Covid-19, flu, and other relevant employee health data in PeopleSoft. Having this data so accessible and manageable enabled University of Florida Health/Shands Healthcare to deploy the data in a reliable analytical format to provide not only management, but also Federal (CDC) and state (FLShots) authorities, sufficient compliance information (for example, flu and Covid vaccination status). In addition, this data was integrated with University of Florida Health’s EPIC EMR, allowing seamless and full disclosure of all compliance. Also, this past year, we established return to work functionality within PeopleSoft and created disaster preparedness functionality for outbreaks such as Covid and unforeseen circumstances such as hurricane scenarios. Before we used to track all of this manually or via Excel spreadsheets. Now, it’s fully automated leveraging PeopleSoft functionality.
We previously upgraded to PeopleSoft HCM 9.2 / Peopletools 8.55.12 and were brave enough to adopt Elasticsearch even though it was just introduced and had some early bugs. We executed a 10 month upgrade cycle which started in Fall of 2016 and ended in Summer of 2017. While we were working on this Upgrade - We were also dealing with a tight timelines with new clinical and non-clinical endeavors.
UF Health had two new hospitals coming up in Gainesville and Jacksonville, Florida area with overall 1000+ open positions to fill and HR team was heavily dependent on PeopleSoft E-recruit and the successful implementation of Elastic Search.
Delays to the project was not an option. During these 10 months - We partnered continually and efficiently with Oracle and SmartERP and helped with fixing bugs and making Elastic Search a more mature product for us and for our peers in the industry. We were glad to be part of the journey of innovation with Oracle, which was enriching and positive experience for everyone involved.