Advocate Health goes live on Workday: what HR needs to know
Advocate Health, the third-largest not-for-profit health system in the U.S., is now live on Workday Human Capital Management, Financial Management, and Supply Chain Management for Healthcare. After combining Advocate Aurora Health and Atrium Health in 2022, the organization needed one system to connect people, finance, and procurement across more than 60 hospitals, 1,000+ sites of care, and six states. With PwC as the deployment partner, that system is now in place.
For HR, this isn't just an IT win. It's a foundation for cleaner data, faster decisions, and a smoother employee experience across a 160,000-person workforce.
Why this matters to HR
- One source of truth: HR, finance, and supply chain live in the same system, reducing reconciliation and rework across teams.
- Mobile self-service that people actually use: staff can request time off, approve schedules, and check pay from their phones-fewer tickets, quicker answers.
- AI-enabled admin work: automatic receipt scanning and quicker expense processing cut cycle times and shrink back-office queues.
- Better resourcing at the point of care: smarter inventory tracking ties supply availability to staffing realities so caregivers have what they need, when they need it.
- Real-time financials: leaders close the books faster and see the cost implications of workforce moves without waiting for batch reports.
Practical takeaways for HR leaders
- Standardize first, then automate: lock in common processes for time, scheduling, job changes, and approvals before turning on advanced features.
- Go mobile-first: design every employee task to be completed in under 60 seconds on a phone. Measure and fix any flow that exceeds that.
- Stand up a cross-functional data council: HR, finance, and supply chain own shared definitions (positions, cost centers, locations) and audit them monthly.
- Make change easy: give managers templated communications, 2-minute "how to" clips, and in-app guidance. Reduce training to what's essential.
- Track the right metrics: time-to-fill, internal mobility rate, first-week completion of onboarding tasks, expense cycle time, and schedule approval SLAs.
- Secure by design: implement role-based access with least privilege, quarterly access reviews, and clear ownership for sensitive fields.
- Create an automation backlog: list repetitive tasks (e.g., license checks, shift differentials, expense exceptions) and tackle them in 2-4 week sprints.
Impact on the employee experience
Small friction points add up. When people can handle time off, shifts, and pay questions on their phone, they feel supported and spend more time on meaningful work. Managers benefit too: fewer emails, fewer status checks, and better visibility across teams. That shows up in morale, retention, and patient outcomes.
How to prepare your HR team
- Skills: Workday reporting, basic financial literacy, and familiarity with supply chain terms that affect staffing and spend.
- AI fluency: teach prompt writing for HR use cases (job descriptions, policy Q&A, onboarding checklists) and set usage guardrails.
- Hands-on practice: build a sandbox playbook-10 common scenarios every HRBP should complete end-to-end.
- Upskilling resources: explore practical programs to bring HR up to speed on AI use in daily work via AI courses by job.
Governance and risk checks
- Data quality: automate validation for job, location, cost center, and manager fields at the point of entry.
- Privacy: document how employee data is used in AI-enabled features and offer opt-out paths where applicable.
- Controls: enforce maker-checker on sensitive changes (comp, position control) and keep an audit trail that finance accepts.
- Exception handling: define fast routes for urgent fixes (pay errors, credential updates) with clear SLAs.
Where this is heading
The move shows how a large health system can simplify work by unifying HR, finance, and supply chain in one place with AI features built in. PwC supported the rollout, and Workday continues to be used by more than 11,000 organizations, including over 65% of the Fortune 500. If you're evaluating a similar path in healthcare, review what's included in Workday for Healthcare and map it to your highest-friction HR processes first.
Bottom line for HR
Unify data, make every task mobile-first, and automate the repetitive work. Put governance around shared definitions and access. Then use the time you save to improve hiring, mobility, and manager capability-the levers that actually move outcomes for your people and your patients.
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