Harris Health's Automating Access to EPSi (Healthcare Financial Decision Support) received the System-Wide Innovation of the Year Award at Harris Health's Fifth Annual Innovation Summit.
Harris Health leaders analyze and use data every day to make business decisions. But ensuring staff has the correct permissions and access to EPSi, Harris Health's healthcare financial decision support application, was a tedious process that had potential for human error.
EPSi is available to all management staff. It helps with budgeting, productivity and offers reports to help make business decisions.
While reports provided through EPSi are invaluable, giving staff access to the correct information wasn't easy due to the manual process of checking and unchecking hundreds of boxes in the application.
"We knew this wasn't an ideal situation — it could take several hours to days to ensure someone had the right permissions. It definitely wasn't the most efficient use of time," says Chris Williams, administrative director, Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. "As a team (comprised of Financial Services and IT), we knew we could do something to automate the process."
The team met with the software company's chief operating officer, who told them automation was impossible. They also talked to other healthcare organizations that used EPSi to see if they had a less tedious process — but no one did.
Determined to come up with a solution, the team partnered with Human Resources to find an answer. The first step was identifying the types of users and what they needed. The team identified every job code that needed access to EPSi and which areas they needed access. This step took three months to complete.
Once a master list was created, the team developed custom codes that identified 40-plus updates required in EPSi software and aligned them to the human resources system and the general ledger department.
Now, if a person transfers to another position, once it's noted in the system, their access to reports will be automatically adjusted. Staff will no longer have to manually check and uncheck hundreds of boxes to give the correct permissions.
"This team is amazing," Williams says. "Through great partnership between IT and Financial Services and with help from HR, we saw an opportunity and thought about what could be done. We were told it couldn't be done, yet we did it."