The role of hospital chief financial officer has changed dramatically over the last 50 years. No longer simply responsible for managing the hospital’s finances, today’s CFO is a change agent, an indispensable member of the leadership team helping chart his or her organization’s long-term success. This white paper examines how the role of hospital CFO has evolved, some ways in which CFOs act as change agents, and how CFOs can draw on their financial expertise and leadership skills to become change-makers in their organizations.
Over the past 10 years, the majority of healthcare providers have had large-scale capital implementations of either an Electronic Health Record (EHR) or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution. Implementations of this magnitude require scope management and extreme focus. As it occurs in most large-scale, multi-year implementations, organizations quickly move from go-live to a phase of performing required updates and system optimizations. For operational departments “low on the priority list”, this leaves them operating on niche systems and IT supporting duplicate or non-standard applications. There are other options.
Facing an array of financial and competitive challenges, stand-alone community hospitals are wondering how much independence they can retain while still providing high-quality, low-cost, and accessible medical care to the people they serve. This report will help hospital leaders understand their options and begin a systematic, long-term planning process to determine their future course.
A regional, 300-bed hospital implemented an EHR system with the expectation that it would improve efficiencies and lower costs while complying with federal Meaningful Use requirements. But the implementation was done without sufficient vendor support or advanced project management techniques, and as a result the hospital did not achieve its intended objectives. Warbird Consulting Partners was brought in to 1), address the problems related to the implementation and 2), establish project-management methodologies while documenting processes to ensure more seamless systems implementations in the future.
University of Chicago Medicine is opening a new clinic in the bustling South Loop as the academic medical center looks to reach more patients beyond its Hyde Park campus.
Physicians specializing in primary care, cardiology and orthopedics, among other specialties, are expected to have up to 75,000 patient visits a year at the 18,000-square-foot clinic. It’s slated to open in October 2016 inside Southgate Market, a retail hub at Canal Street and Roosevelt Road that includes Whole Foods Market, DSW shoe store and Marshalls. Read the article in its entirety.
The Department of Health and Human Services threw down the gauntlet in late January when Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced its intention to increase value-based purchasing dramatically in the next few years.
HHS plans to move its payment system to 30 percent value-based in 2016 and 50 percent by 2018. It also plans to have 95 percent of fee-for-service plans include some sort of value and efficiency components by 2018. Read the article in its entirety.
University of Chicago Medicine has launched a study to see what it would take for the prominent South Side institution to open an adult trauma center of its own.
The study, launched in late January, also will identify other needs. They include addressing capacity issues at the three-hospital Hyde Park campus. U of C estimates it would need 35 beds for trauma patients, but few empty beds are available for the specialized care trauma patients would need. Read the article in its entirety.
In this Business Profile, Doug Fenstermaker, managing partner and executive vice president of health care, Warbird Consulting Partners, shares strategies to leverage outsourced CFO expertise to lead special projects or fill interim roles while recruiting is underway. Read the article in its entirety.
Who is going to break the news when an audit takes a bad turn or there is a breakdown in a negotiation with a payer? The CFO, of course. There is no way to make bad news sound good, but, according to CFOs who have been there, it is possible to soften the blow. Read the article in its entirety.
In 1982, Chuck Weis took his first steps inside the financial department of Sinai Health System, a safety-net provider on the South Side of Chicago. He was Sinai’s assistant controller at the time, but his public accounting background helped him ascend into the CFO role only four years later. Read the article in its entirety.