Becker's Hospital Review asked healthcare leaders to share their tips to ensure financial stability.
Here are their responses, presented alphabetically.
Editor's Note: Responses have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Suzanne Anderson
President of Virginia Mason Medical Center (Seattle)
Standardize internal processes across your organization as much as possible to eliminate duplication and other waste that drive costs. When the same tasks are consistently performed the same way throughout the enterprise, it reduces the risk for human error and improves efficiency, quality and the patient experience while helping to control cost. Over the past 18 years of using our innovative management method, the Virginia Mason Production System, to identify and eliminate waste, and standardize our work, we've discovered that the path to higher quality is the same path to lower cost.
Kristine Hanscom
Senior vice president and CFO of Tufts Medical Center (Boston)
In the future, taking on risk will be increasingly important. This, in turn, drives the need for greater collaboration with our physicians and partners to manage the cost and quality of care for our patient population. We need to fully embrace outcomes-based healthcare in order to survive the transition to value-based care. An underlying imperative to all of this is putting the patient's perspective at the center of our thinking. A patient-centered vision must motivate everything we do.
Scott Hawig
Executive vice president of finance, chief financial and administrative officer and treasurer of Froedtert Health (Milwaukee)
Right care, right place, right time. Provide the right care at the right place at the right time.
Dan Rieber
CFO of UCHealth (Aurora, Colo.)
One of the most strategic ways to strengthen our financial future is to invest in innovation. Technology that improves operations and streamlines how providers deliver patient care is transforming our industry. Health systems who act as innovation health tech incubators, partnering with and investing in innovative companies and providing knowledge experts, can develop the tools to truly change healthcare delivery.
UCHealth's innovation initiatives include decision support tools embedded in the electronic medical record, tools that use big data and machine learning to create more efficient operating rooms and infusion centers, telehealth services and online scheduling. Wearable devices are tracking patients' vital signs constantly, and virtual health services offer rural emergency department patients access to the very best stroke and psychiatry experts. Many of these innovation tools developed through UCHealth partnerships with other companies are now being used at hospitals around the country. This vision pulls together brilliant minds in tech, IT and health to give them the tools to rethink the delivery of medicine — mostly important, for the benefit of the patients, but also for our future financial stability.