Though chief financial officers have long been seen as their organizations' strategic partners, "the degree to which it's the norm and expected is much more significant now than it was even five to 10 years ago," according to Daniel Morissette, senior executive vice president and CFO of Dignity and CFO of CommonSpirit Health, based in Chicago.
During a keynote address at the Becker's Hospital Review CEO + CFO Roundtable in Chicago on Nov. 11, Mr. Morissette discussed how the role of hospital and health system CFOs has evolved in recent years, specifically in regards to three areas that he highlighted as CommonSpirit's central focuses as an enterprise.
The three areas are:
1. Innovation: "When we look at the allocation of costs, we do lots and lots of things with population health, with preventative medicine, with recruiting physicians, with technology improvement, digital enhancements — and still, the total dollars spent on that are dwarfed by doing some of the more traditional things health systems do," Mr. Morissette said. "We're in this very funny place where the goal of the company is to make a difference in our communities in a very different way, and we're definitely moving toward that, but the costs and revenue are still mostly tied up in the acute care system."
2. Collaboration: "One of the reasons that the Catholic Health Initiative and Dignity Health affiliation has worked so well is both organizations had a strong history of partnerships throughout the community. When we talk about collaboration, of course, we're certainly talking about the collaborations we have with other care providers, but also, we're not good at doing everything, so we have many, many partnerships that we use to help augment the bridge from where we are today to where we're going to be going in the next several years. By collaborating with a wide range of entrepreneurs and partners we are finding new solutions," Mr. Morissette explained.
3. Social responsibility and community investment: "We believe that we need to look beyond the services we provide in our brick-and-mortar hospitals into the communities we serve. We have provided nearly $140 million thus far for our community investment program with a clear objective to confront health inequity head-on," he said. "We do believe that economic stability is one of the most critical factors in building healthy communities and this starts at helping these communities with job creation. We are investing this way not only as an employer in our community, but also by investing in small and minority-owned businesses by providing micro loans to jumpstart local economies."