Tāmaki Health wins Asia-Pacific Oracle Award for its HR transformation

FEATURE - Industry Innovation Article - Deloitte

New Zealand's largest independent primary healthcare group has halved recruitment times and enabled mobile workforce management across more than 50 clinics using Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM (Human Capital Management) in partnership with implementation partner Deloitte.

Tāmaki Health recently won Oracle's Asia-Pacific Breakthrough Award for implementing a comprehensive digital human resources system that transforms how the healthcare organisation manages its 1,500 staff serving 350,000 enrolled patients.

The global award was presented at Oracle's conference in Las Vegas and attended by 80,000 people.

Benefits of transformation

Lisa Ryan, chief people capability and culture officer at Tāmaki Health, says the organisation was looking to improve the employee experience all the way through from recruitment to onboarding and working for Tāmaki.

“We wanted to make that whole experience seamless and easy for people with less bureaucracy and paperwork, and a reduction in errors in their information, which also improves our data quality,” she says. 

“This improves our understanding of who our people are, allowing us to quickly diagnose what we are doing with respect to training, recruitment and turnover, to ensure we are running these processes in a highly efficient and accurate manner.”

Ryan says the new system addresses longstanding challenges faced by the organisation, which still relied heavily on Excel spreadsheets, Word documents, DocuSign and emails.

Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM enables the entire employee lifecycle to be managed through mobile devices. 

Managers can now approve job offers from their mobile phones, which has helped to significantly reduce recruitment time by around 50 percent.

"Once approved we can get an offer letter out within an hour or two," Ryan says. 

"The candidate can get that offer letter immediately through a link and assuming they accept it, we can move into that onboarding phase immediately."

She says mobile access is crucial for a workforce that includes over 600 health professionals who are often moving between clinics.

"They know when they are working, where they are working, how much they are going to get paid, and they can look at their pays - all through their phone,” says Ryan.

Implementation and impact

The project was implemented in phases in partnership with Deloitte. The first focused on core systems including recruiting, onboarding, training, compensation review and succession planning. The second phase will add rostering, absence management and time tracking capabilities.

Ryan says the expertise and collaborative approach of the Deloitte team significantly contributed to the project’s success and they continue to be a valuable partner as the organisation looks to realise further benefits.

The system has been "very well regarded and well received”. Managers have appreciated the speed and ease of processes and new employees like the easy access to assigned training and immediate feedback when it is completed.

Chief digital officer Samir Ranchhod says the organisation's digital strategy focused first on clinic-facing improvements before expanding to back-office functions. 

"We have led a culture of innovation and transformation. A lot of that has been forward facing with our clinics initially, which has made it a much easier process to get staff to adapt to the change,” he says.

Ryan says the system's impact extends beyond administrative efficiency to patient care, as shorter recruitment times mean some roles are being filled as soon as the previous employee finishes.

This is particularly important for nursing and GP positions and results in the clinics being able to see more patients in a day.

The system also streamlines mandatory training and compliance processes such as audits, with managers able to quickly summarise all staff at specific clinics and provide evidence of qualifications and training.

Compensation reviews, including back-pay calculations, now integrate directly with payroll systems.

"Before Oracle HCM it could take two to four weeks to work through all of the back pay issues,” she says.

A stand-out system

Ryan has previous experience implementing Oracle HCM at a 24,000-person organisation across 34 US states and was impressed by Oracle's focus on back-end engineering and its position as part of a broader technology ecosystem.

"Oracle have a reputation based on focusing their efforts and resources on their developers: the technicians that are actually developing the product," she says.

Ranchhod says the platform's ‘out of the box’ artificial intelligence capabilities were a key factor in the decision to go with Oracle. 

"It is a platform that is already AI ready,” he says, adding that the organisation plans to implement AI agents in the future.

For recruitment, this could reduce the need to advertise new roles as the AI will be able to mine existing candidate pools. 

Ryan explains; "we will be able to tell it: go to the nursing talent pool of previous applications and look for nurses that have these particular qualifications or this particular experience or they live in this particular area”.

Also, for workforce planning using rostering data combined with patient visit information. 

" AI agents could tell us where is the greatest patient need, and therefore, where we should be rostering certain doctors or nurses and prescribers at certain times in certain places,” she says.

Global recognition

Ranchhod says winning the award was particularly significant as Tāmaki was competing against much larger international companies in the Asia-Pacific region.

“I am hugely proud because this recognises not just a technology deployment, but the collective discipline, resilience, and ambition of our entire organisation,” he says. 

“This achievement reflects what becomes possible when our teams from people and capability (HR) , operational leaders, and our digital teams move in sync toward a common vision.” 

Image: Lisa Ryan, chief people capability and culture officer and Samir Ranchhod, chief digital officer - Tāmaki Health, at the Oracle Awards.

If you have any questions re the above feature article, please contact the editor Rebecca McBeth.

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