From looking for new growth opportunities and partnerships to keeping an open mind to diverse points of view, Becker's connected with four executives to ask them, "What advice do you have for other health system and hospital CFOs to help boost their margins in the new year?"
Here are their responses.
Editor's note: Some responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Shelly Schorer. CFO of the California division of CommonSpirit Health (Chicago): Make sure that you are watching all aspects of your responsibility, making sure that we don't lose sight, and that we also look for new opportunities for growth. There will be new challenges and things that we can do.
I think that we need to continue to look for ways to promote reimbursement for high-cost pharmaceuticals. I think we're going to see new innovations in pharmaceuticals and with that comes the cost that's hard to pay for, but in the long run it creates better long-term outcomes for patients. It seems cliche, but ways to save money and ways to do things the most efficiently but not impact quality at all.
Joseph D'Angina. CFO of NorthBay Health (Fairfield, Calif.): Execute, execute, execute. Remain focused on the plan at hand without being distracted by those "shiny objects". Assure whatever plan is being pursued, the entire leadership team is in lock-step, and resolve any deviations within the leadership team only.
Communicate the details of the plan with regular check-ins to the broader management team, identifying what success looks like and measuring that success along the way with specific time limits identified. Don’t underestimate the perception of small spends within the organization (unnecessary travel, meals accompanying meetings, etc.) – these types of expenditures will create a mixed message. Celebrate the incremental successes.
Chris Bergman. Vice president and CFO of Dayton Children's (Ohio): I talk to my peers a lot. The children's hospital world has a really great collaborative group around the country, we all have kind of similar things. A lot of it is continuing to look at what we call the revenue cycle.
One thing you've obviously got to think about in our world is payers don't tend to want to pay more than they're paying you. They're looking for ways to pay you less. So, they'll change certain things they allow or disallow, or things they're going to start looking at.
You just have to stay on top of it because you can lose money out of that really fast. So you have to have a really tight revenue cycle. I always say to my CFO peers, you just have to just put the money into that, do what you need to do to keep it really sharp. It's easy to only collect 95% where you're supposed to and that 5% is a really big number at that point in time. So it's just that constant challenge.
Andy Zukowski. CFO of ECU (Greenville, N.C.): The biggest advice that I have that was given to me is to always be open to diverse points of view, other perspectives. It's through that process that we learn, that we can make good sound decisions, and create strong environments for success.
In finance, our role is to facilitate decisions, to support and enable our mission and strategy, and so with that we really have to strengthen our relationships and partnerships throughout the organization to be effective. It's not just the numbers, it's about insights.
Always focus on the development of others. Whether it's within the finance organization or other peers that you interface with, always approach it with how can I help this person, solve the problem, be empowered to lead, as well as have their development and their best interest in mind. It's through that process that we create a successful team. My goal is to just make a big impact across Eastern North Carolina, across the organization, something that's bigger than myself.