From patchwork to platform: how UMP consolidated HR, expenses, and clinician goal tracking in Rippling

About University Medical Partners

University Medical Partners (UMP) is the community medical group for Stanford Healthcare, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Its mission is simple: restore joy to the practice of medicine. The belief behind it is equally straightforward: happier, healthier doctors produce happier, healthier patients.

The Challenge

Jordan Ballam did not need long to understand the problem. Within days of joining UMP as CFO, he had identified the core issue: the organization was running on an HR and payroll system that actively got in the way of doing business. For a medical group whose entire philosophy centers on removing friction for clinicians, that was untenable.

Reporting that consumed more time than it saved

Jordan came to UMP from a background in data warehousing and analytics. His standard for good reporting was high, and ADP did not come close to meeting it. Running a simple payroll report could take 60 minutes or more. Fields had clunky, inconsistent names that made them hard to identify, and selecting the wrong one meant having to start over from scratch. The experience was so frustrating that Jordan and his team found themselves avoiding the system rather than getting value from it.

The downstream effect was worse than wasted time. Because pulling accurate data was so difficult, the finance team was never fully confident in the numbers they did manage to extract. For an organization managing physician compensation, expense reimbursements, and payroll for 300+ employees, operating on unreliable data was a significant risk.

Clinicians with no visibility into their own information

UMP’s physicians and advanced practice clinicians are highly compensated, highly skilled, and have very little patience for administrative friction. ADP gave them almost none of what they needed at their fingertips. Logging in was cumbersome, and finding basic information — a pay stub, a benefits summary, a reimbursement balance — required navigating a system that was not built for the pace of medical care.

The result was predictable: clinicians stopped trying to find information themselves and started emailing the admin team in search of answers. Every question that should have been self-serve became a task for someone in finance or HR to chase down manually.

Expense reimbursement managed on a homegrown form

Physician expense reimbursement at UMP had no formal system behind it. To try to hack together a standard process for paying out continuing medical education (CME), the team had improvised a job form to manage clinician tracking against an annual balance. It offered a painful lack of visibility. Clinicians could not easily see what had been approved, what had been paid, or how much of their CME balance remained. Finance team members were fielding five to ten CME inquiries per week, with each one taking 20 to 30 minutes to investigate and resolve. That single category alone was consuming more than five hours of staff time every week.

A system nobody wanted to use

The cumulative effect of all of this was an HR platform that the organization worked around, rather than with. Three people used ADP at an administrative level, and even they found it painful. The rest of the organization had opted out entirely. For a medical group that wanted to attract and retain top clinical talent in one of the most competitive markets in the country, an HR system that felt outdated and inaccessible was a significant liability.

The Solution

Jordan initiated the search for a new system almost immediately after joining UMP. The evaluation was structured around a clear set of criteria: a platform built on its own integrated data architecture, flexible and fast reporting, a modern employee experience, and the ability to handle the compliance nuances that come with running a healthcare organization. After evaluating Rippling alongside ADP, Paylocity, and Kronos, UMP chose Rippling — in part because of the product itself, and in part because of how the Rippling team showed up during the sales process. They were responsive, specific about how the product could address UMP’s pain points, and transparent about what was on the roadmap. That combination of agility and honesty landed well with a team that prides itself on being at the forefront of innovation.

Reporting trusted by the entire team

The shift in reporting capability was immediate and significant. What had taken an hour in ADP now took minutes — and the interface was intuitive enough that any member of the admin team could use it without training. Jordan, who regularly needs to pull ad hoc data mid-conversation with clinicians or legal counsel, can now get accurate, detailed information in real time rather than preparing for meetings with whatever data he managed to extract in advance.

The broader impact was an expansion of who does reporting at all. Where three people had previously been ADP’s only users, all 25 members of UMP’s admin team now pull data from Rippling regularly — including the company’s accountants, who use it to audit monthly reconciliations. The system went from being avoided to being embedded in how the entire organization operates.

Expense reimbursement from hours to minutes

Rippling’s expense management replaced UMP’s informal job form and closed the visibility gap that had been generating hours of finance team work every week. Clinicians can now see their CME balance in real time, track what has been reimbursed and what is pending, and submit expenses without relying on the finance team to chase down answers for them.

What had been one of Jordan’s primary reasons for searching for a new system — and one of the most time-consuming problems his team managed daily — became his lowest concern. The five-plus hours per week his team spent on CME inquiries alone dropped to a matter of minutes per request.

Rippling AI across the organization

When Rippling AI launched, UMP was among the first to put it to work — and adoption spread quickly across roles and use cases in a way that reflected just how differently the organization was now operating compared to its ADP days.

For Jordan, the impact was immediate. Many of the reporting use cases he had planned to solve through custom builds were absorbed by Rippling AI instead. Mid-conversation with a clinician questioning their compensation, or on a call with legal counsel reviewing expense history, Jordan can now pull precise, real-time answers without leaving the conversation to dig through a reporting module. The AI also handles permissions correctly out of the box — a site leader querying expense data sees their team’s information, while an individual clinician sees only their own. That permission inheritance, which Jordan’s team pressure-tested heavily, worked from day one.

For clinicians, Rippling AI removed the last remaining reason to contact the admin team. A physician who wants to know their PTO balance, their CME reimbursement status, or their progress toward a goal can now ask directly — without clicking into any additional screens. For a workforce that finds every extra step in an HR system a source of frustration, that frictionless access has meaningfully reduced the volume of inbound requests the admin team fields.

UMP’s internal data team has pushed the capability further still, using Rippling AI to build and maintain complex formula-driven reports that previously required significant manual effort. What started as a reporting tool has become, for the team’s most technical users, something closer to a data analyst that is always on and always current.

The contrast with ADP could not be more stark. A system that three people used reluctantly now serves 25 admin team members actively — and an AI layer that did not exist two years ago is handling queries across finance, HR, and clinical operations in real time.

A centralized hub for everything UMP publishes

UMP took the flexibility of Rippling’s custom apps and turned the platform into something beyond an HRIS. Any business intelligence dashboard built in Tableau gets published as a custom app on the Rippling homepage, so employees know that if UMP is sharing something company-wide, it lives in Rippling. The platform has become the organization’s single front door for information.

UMP built a custom app in Rippling that pulls live data from Epic, the organization’s electronic health record system, and surfaces each clinician’s real-time progress against their individual goals. What had previously lived in a hard-to-manage Google Sheet is now a clean, secure, personalized dashboard that clinicians can access directly in Rippling without logging into any other system.

The Impact

• Reporting went from an hour to real time: What once took 60 minutes and multiple attempts in ADP now takes minutes in Rippling.

• CME reimbursement calculations became a breeze: Five-plus hours of weekly finance team time spent on continuing medical education inquiries was reduced to a few minutes per request, freeing the team to focus on higher-value work.

• Clinicians got self-service: Physicians and APCs can now check their pay, PTO, and expenses directly in Rippling without contacting the admin team — removing a consistent source of friction for clinicians and admin staff.

• Tracking clinicians could trust: What once required a finance team member to track manually now pulls live data from Epic and surfaces each clinician’s progress in real time.

• One platform for everything: Rippling became UMP’s centralized hub for payroll, expenses, reporting, tracking, and company-wide communications — replacing a patchwork of disconnected tools with a single place clinicians and staff actually want to use.