It’s no secret that easy access to medical care improves patient health. But high costs, logistical hassles, and a lack of connections can prevent people from seeking the care they need. This is especially true for low-income seniors. ChenMed developed a concierge-style primary care model to help change that. With an emphasis on developing better doctor-patient relationships to drive healthier outcomes, ChenMed gives care providers more time to get to know their patients and help them live healthy lives. The organization removes common hurdles to accessing care by coordinating transportation to appointments and providing medication services on-site. And it’s working. ChenMed patients have fewer trips to the emergency room and are hospitalized less often than patients with more typical healthcare approaches.
It’s a great testament to Workday that we were able to maintain our transaction volume during COVID-19. Even better, we didn’t skip a beat in our P2P process and stood up over 15 new centers during the COVID outbreak in 2020.
Director of Financial Operations
Great care translates into fast growth.
ChenMed’s approach is popular with both patients and caregivers, and the results have sparked media attention. Even during the pandemic, the company continued to grow, opening over 30 new care centers since March 2020.
For several years, ChenMed has used Workday to manage its business operations as the organization expands and evolves. Gary Alicea, director of financial operations at ChenMed, says, “Workday enables the scalability and best practices that allow us to pursue our ambitious growth goals.”
Finance becomes a full-service organization.
ChenMed executives are always looking to make business operations more responsive and efficient. The less time finance teams spend on administrative tasks, the more time they have to provide full-service support to the practice. To make it easier to manage its vendors and procurement, ChenMed decided to reinvent its finance operations.
The company combined its procurement, sourcing, and accounts payable teams and reconfigured Workday Financial Management to merge each workflow into a single, automated source-to-pay (S2P) process. Ana Deahora, senior manager of procure-to-pay (P2P) and payroll at ChenMed, says, “Thanks to Workday, we have a full-service team for our internal customers and vendors. Everyone’s an expert now. And we can all answer questions regarding vendor agreements or procurement options.”
With EDI and OCR together, we will get very close to our goal of 100% automation for routine processes.
Senior Financial Systems Analyst
Fueling care delivery by empowering the finance team.
Reinventing procurement and providing self-service capabilities help ChenMed improve the employee experience companywide, including that of the clinicians, who want to focus on helping patients. Simplifying vendor onboarding and approvals and creating the right security roles in Workday assist the P2P team in supporting the evolving procurement needs of clinical staff and medical centers. Jorge Vidal, senior financial systems analyst at ChenMed, says, “Clinicians can reach vendor storefronts through Workday and, without requiring assistance, order items that align with our policies and approvals.”
This innovation is benefiting the entire company. Deahora explains, “Our executives can clearly see how much value we add. When we compare industry benchmarks with how we do our jobs in Workday, we can do more with a smaller staff and fewer errors than the industry standard.” Finance staff also gained time for more high-value activities. “Now my team can perform data analysis because all the fundamental aspects of financial management are handled by Workday,” Deahora adds.
With automatic data collection and transparency enabled by Workday, we can have a true supply chain management team.
Senior Manager of Procure-to-Pay and Payroll
Evolving from vendor management to strategic sourcing.
Starting with its largest suppliers, ChenMed has made vendor management more efficient and resilient, generating direct savings. Vidal says, “With Workday, we no longer have to worry about accounts payable aging. We get better discounts from our vendors because our payments are timely. And instead of just managing transactions, we have more time to develop rewarding vendor relationships.”
ChenMed has extended P2P into a more comprehensive S2P workflow with increased visibility and control. Alicea notes, “For instance, we can see how much we are spending in certain categories and consolidate on key vendors.” Having transformed the previous manual processes to leverage enterprise automation, the organization has been able to create a specialized sourcing team to boost savings with strategic initiatives. “We just ran our first reverse auction with Workday Strategic Sourcing and saved about $70K. It is an additional enabler in delivering affordable VIP care for our seniors,” says Alicea.
Winning back time for driving growth.
Workday automations are key to growing while managing finance with lean resources. ChenMed uses electronic data interchange (EDI) communications with larger vendors. Vidal explains, “With Workday EDI, we can close gaps with vendors, as the system records invoices without requiring an accounts payable specialist to take action.”
Many of the company’s typical use cases benefit from this automation. Anna Tian, financial systems manager at ChenMed, says, “Invoice matching, payments, and other steps happen almost without human intervention. This kind of efficiency is critical for the growth goals we’ve set for the next four to five years.”
Finance looking forward.
Building on its current success, ChenMed is adopting more Workday capabilities to keep pace with its rapid expansion. The supplier portal provides further ways to automate transactions, offering self-service for vendors to create invoices directly from POs. “The goal has always been to increase the AP team’s work capacity without adding headcount,” Tian notes. “The supplier portal will create additional capacity for us.”
Furthermore, the project’s functionality in Workday will enable ChenMed to streamline management and ensure purchases are properly recorded against each project. Tian concludes, “We are expanding very fast and building a lot of centers. Workday allows us to continue to scale and support that accelerated growth.”
Related Content