Doug Watson, CFO of Minneapolis-based Allina Health, is ready to hit the ground running with innovative ideas in his newly appointed role, after spending the past six months as interim CFO at the health system.
Mr. Watson told Becker's that during his time as interim CFO, he had the opportunity to discover areas of both opportunity and challenge at the health system, which posted a $352.6 million operating loss in 2023.
Since then, Allina Health has implemented significant performance improvement efforts that began even before Mr. Watson came on board. Efforts, he equates to a "back to basics thinking."
"...Really trying to understand the key drivers of the organization," Mr. Watson said. "Trying to understand where we have opportunities to improve particularly things like throughput. In healthcare it's really meaningful when you think about, 'can we look at the way we're doing things and redesign templates or redesign processes or redesign the way patient scheduling is functioning?'"
Mr. Watson pointed to the importance of looking at ways to free up patient visit slots so that more people can be seen and taken care of.
In this case, not only will it improve the ability for patients to be seen and cared for, but it's also an improvement for an organization's economics.
"Because you've got a large fixed cost base in the organization, as every healthcare system does," he said. "If you're able to see more patients through that same fixed cost base it makes the economics work a lot better. I think that's been one of the focus efforts around really trying to understand where do we have opportunities to look at that."
Mr. Watson also pointed to the strong partnerships that Allina has invested in this year, including its RCM partnership with UnitedHealth Group's Optum to improve care for patients and providers.
The partnership brought more than 2,000 Allina information systems and revenue cycle management employees under Optum's employment on May 5.
"We already had a very good, excellent actually, revenue cycle and IT function, but combining them with Optum, that can bring the scale that's becoming more and more important in healthcare. I think we'll be able to take that to yet another level which will help support our organization," he said.
Lastly, the health system plans to kick off a long-range strategic financial planning process this summer.
The process will home in on additional areas of investment and growth opportunities.
"It's pretty exciting," Mr. Watson said. "It's part of what really makes healthcare fun, when you start thinking about how can you make things better? How can we create more access? How can we identify new services?"
For other financial healthcare leaders looking to make improvements to their organization, Mr. Watson said it's all about stepping back and rethinking things.
"Just because you've been doing something a certain way for a long time, doesn't mean that that's the best way for you to do it," he said. "Give thought to who your partners are, and are there partners that can help you accelerate things in a way that you can't do on your own, that then help benefit the organization and then you can focus on other things that really you have to do yourself."