EmblemHealth modernizes operations in Oracle Cloud
The nonprofit insurer cut costs and improved efficiencies by consolidating its back-office systems on Oracle’s integrated cloud applications.
“Oracle is a very powerful tool, and we're only scratching the surface now. I'm excited to give my team the tools they need to be successful.”
Business challenges
EmblemHealth is one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health insurers, with 3.2 million members and an 80-year legacy of serving New York’s communities. The company offers a full range of commercial and government-sponsored health plans to employers, individuals and families, as well as convenient community resources. As a market leader in value-based care, EmblemHealth partners with top doctors and hospitals to deliver quality, affordable care.
The healthcare industry is consolidating as providers aim to cut costs and improve patient outcomes. But after insurer EmblemHealth acquired a hospital network and a for-profit HMO, it was left with a patchwork of legacy systems running on different platforms, as well as multiple sources of data and no single source of truth.
As a result, EmblemHealth and its subsidiaries and affiliates were challenged to work in unison. Managers did procurement and invoicing in one system, and account reconciliation, book balancing, and budgeting on another. There was no easy way to get a 360-degree view of an employee. And getting reports and analytics for the company as a whole was difficult. To add to the complexity, the company’s core finance system—an early version of PeopleSoft—badly needed an upgrade.
We were able to cut down the processing times from three days to under three hours.
Why EmblemHealth Chose Oracle
EmblemHealth evaluated whether to pursue a series of complex upgrades and integrations. It ultimately decided to undergo a bigger transformation—namely, moving the organization’s entire infrastructure and its enterprise applications to Oracle Cloud. The company decided to move all of its financial, HR, and supply chain functions to Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, EPM, HCM, and SCM applications. It accomplished this in only 11 months.
Results
Consolidating systems in the cloud brought significant cost savings and opened a range of opportunities for transforming the organization and creating new value for members. In the process, the healthcare company refreshed its technology stack and moved to a truly future-proof cloud.
Its financial processes were more automated and standardized after adopting Oracle Cloud ERP and EPM applications’ best practices for tasks such as expense approval, procurement, and budgeting. In HR, everything from compensation cycles to goal setting are becoming standardized, thanks to Oracle Cloud HCM.
The organization now has a unified reporting platform along with powerful capabilities for drilling down into the finest details of its operations. And it has replaced disjointed workflows with seamless, end-to-end processes—from requisition to journal entry, for example. The budget allocation process has become more efficient, accelerating the monthly close cycle by more than a day.
Although still early in its transformation, EmblemHealth expects these changes to save it as much as $700,000 per year, in addition to IT savings of 30% or more over the next five years.
Partners
EmblemHealth worked closely with partner Cognizant and was able to implement 17 modules in less than a year. Today, Cognizant continues to collaborate with EmblemHealth to fine-tune new cloud-enabled capabilities, such as automated invoice processing using optical character recognition technology. The shared goal is to eventually reduce manual processing by as much as 60%, generating more savings and speeding the vendor payments process.