Northwell Health extends HR support around the clock

Northwell Health, with 28 hospitals and more than 1,050 ambulatory/outpatient sites, cares for more than 3 million people annually in the greater New York–Connecticut area. Its HR organization supports more than 90,000 physicians, nurses, and other staff whose work continues around the clock.

For Elina Petrillo, vice president and head of HR technology, the purpose of HR technology is closely connected to Northwell’s mission. “Our goal is to deliver just-in-time services to all of our team members, helping them deliver the best healthcare,” she says.

Support team members on their schedule

Northwell’s HR support center used to operate Monday through Friday and only during business hours. Clinicians and other team members working nights and weekends had nowhere to go during those hours to get answers to their questions about pay, benefits, leave, or other HR matters. Northwell considered extending its support center hours, particularly during high-demand periods such as benefits enrollment, but it saw a broader opportunity to rethink how HR services could fit the schedules of a 24/7 workforce.

Give team members one place to start

Northwell’s HR organization had already established Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM) applications as the foundation for managing its HR processes. Using Oracle Digital Assistant for HCM, the organization developed AskHR, which now gives team members answers to routine questions on their mobile devices and desktops. Team members can move to a live chat or speak with a person when a situation is more complicated or sensitive.

Northwell went live with Oracle Digital Assistant for HCM in 2023. Through AskHR, team members initially received prepared answers to predefined questions. Northwell later began adding Oracle AI agents that work behind the AskHR experience, using the HR processes and data in Oracle Fusion Cloud HCM to handle more complex requests in areas where team members need the most support.

Among those AI agents are MyTime, which handles timekeeping and scheduling questions, and an open enrollment agent, which helps frontline workers get quick answers about benefits. Together, these two agents solve 73% of employee inquiries without the employee needing to contact an HR representative. The average resolution time is about five minutes, with some inquiries resolved in 30 seconds. The agents have handled more than 57,000 sessions so far, Petrillo says.

Payroll became a more ambitious test. Questions about salaries, direct deposits, taxes, deductions, and pay dates can require significant context and precision, especially across Northwell’s weekly, biweekly, and semimonthly pay schedules.

Despite that complexity, Northwell implemented the payroll agent in less than a month. In its first week, the agent handled 479 sessions, representing almost 9% of all AskHR sessions, even before Northwell broadly promoted the new capability to team members. Payroll became the second-largest category for AI routing, behind benefits. Those early results gave Northwell a strong signal that AI could take on more complex HR needs.

Move from answers to actions

Northwell’s longer-term plan is to move beyond just providing answers to employees’ HR questions. By combining Oracle Cloud HCM’s AI capabilities with the HR processes and data already managed by the application suite, Northwell can start connecting employee questions with the actions needed to resolve them, with the goal of removing administrative work for clinicians, frontline managers, and other team members.

For example, a team member who has moved to a new home could ask AskHR which address is on file, provide the new address, and initiate the update through the same conversational experience. Rather than finding the right application or process themselves, employees could move from asking a question to taking the necessary action in one place.

At the same time, Northwell recognizes that some situations still require human judgment or personal assistance. The organization’s AI governance approach considers where a person should remain part of the process.

Northwell is also finding that personal support isn’t automatically the preferred channel. Petrillo says some team members appear most comfortable using AskHR for answers to their questions about retirement benefits, medical plan costs, or coverage for a family member.

Prioritize the problems worth solving

As more Northwell employees see what AI agents can do, the organization has no shortage of ideas for additional use cases. The HR organization is evaluating a career advisor agent as it considers new ways to help employees develop their careers and support the health system’s broader talent goals.

The harder question is deciding which AI agents merit the time and investment. Northwell evaluates potential AI projects based on factors such as expected value, implementation effort, how easily a use case can be standardized and maintained, and the total cost of ownership. The payroll agent, which was implemented in less than a month, reflects that approach: Northwell identified a clear employee need and pursued a use case the team could implement without an excessive investment of time or resources.

Learn from every question

Close to 40,000 people are now interacting with AskHR. Northwell is using those interactions not only to answer questions but also to understand how people naturally ask for help.

The HR technology team reviews questions, answers, and cases where the system doesn’t provide a useful response. When Northwell examined early payroll interactions, for example, it found that some team members entered only a single term such as “W2,” giving the team insight into how the experience and employee guidance could be improved.

Northwell has also added the capability for employees to give an answer a thumbs-up or thumbs-down and leave a comment. That information becomes another input as the HR team decides what to adjust. “This is not a one and done implementation,” Petrillo says. “It’s a continuous improvement implementation.”

That approach also recognizes that a team member’s previous experience with AskHR may not reflect what the system can do today. Northwell wants employees to return, try again, and become more comfortable asking questions as the technology and the organization’s implementation develop.

About the customer

Learn more about Northwell Health