6 healthcare CFO insights from the Crowe Healthcare Summit

A feature of the annual Crowe Healthcare Summit is the opportunity for attendees to hear directly from some of the healthcare industry’s leading CFOs. Here’s what six of them had to say.

It’s a question many people are asking right now as the industry transitions into a new healthcare economy: What are healthcare CFOs thinking?

If you were one of the more than 500 healthcare finance, internal audit, and revenue cycle leaders who attended the 12th annual Crowe Healthcare Summit in Denver or online, Sept. 19-22, 2022, you would know as the topic dominated the four-day, hybrid in-person and virtual event.

But if you didn’t attend in person or online, we’ve got you covered.

The Healthcare Summit opened with a keynote presentation and panel discussion on the mind of a healthcare CFO. More specifically, Eric Boggs, principal in Crowe healthcare consulting, unveiled a CFO mind map. The map teases out all the things that healthcare CFOs are responsible for and worry about.

The seven major synapses are:

Capital planning
Finance
Managed care
Managerial accounting and reporting
Planning and budgeting
Revenue cycle
Taxes

The mind map was a Healthcare Summit showstopper as everyone clamored for their own copy.

Meanwhile, six senior-level finance executives from some of the nation’s most prominent hospitals and health systems made the mind map come to life as they shared their thoughts and ideas on the most pressing healthcare financial issues of the day.

Here are 12 insights from the six executives and links to summary broadcasts of the Healthcare Summit sessions at which they shared their wisdom.

Dawn Davidson
Vice President, National Net Revenue Management, Ascension

“We really are still remote. All of our back-office functions are still remote. I don’t see that changing – definitely not in the next three to six months. We’ll see how it plays out over time, but people like it.”

“To do your job effectively, you need to understand to some extent what other departments do and how you fit in to be able to do your job right. Get on projects that expose you to other areas or work with the other areas. You’re going to need to be well rounded to grow in your career and not be so siloed.”

– From the “Strategic Leadership: Pivoting Through the Pandemic” breakout session
Watch a summary broadcast

Chris Harrison
CFO, Quorum Health

“If you look back 10 or 15 years ago, the CFO was your typical bean counter – maybe wearing a pocket protector, maybe walking around with 10 keys and a calculator. Fast forward to today, and you’ve got traditional accounting, but there’s also a pretty high level of strategy put into place. The CFO has to be strategic with the business. You have to have a strategic mind.”

“Human resources comes in and wants to offer the best benefits, best healthcare coverage, best employee rewards, give employees carte blanche of everything. You can do that, and that’s great. But obviously there’s a financial impact. Yes, from a recruitment and retention standpoint, offering the top benefits, top sign-on bonuses, top retention bonuses to reduce your use of contract labor is critical. But there needs to be more analytics and analysis around what the cost of that is and what it’s going to cost over the next two or three years to implement those increases, those benefits, those retention bonuses, and are we going to see any offset in less contract labor? And if so, then maybe it makes sense.”

– From the “Entering the CFO Mind (Map)” opening keynote session
Watch a summary broadcast

Kim Hodgkinson
Senior Vice President and CFO, Hospital Sisters Health System

“A CFO today must be a strategic partner. You’re really leading through change and influencing. Telling the story is so important. It’s not telling the pluses and minuses of the story. It’s telling the why so people can move forward. It’s really important that as the CFO today, you’re not just delivering the bad news. You’re delivering the news of the why and recommending perhaps the direction we should be going.”

“At the colleague level, a lot of trust was broken during the pandemic. To restore that trust, we need to come up with that ‘yes’ answer or a ‘yes, how can we do this’ mentality versus the CFO ‘no,’ which has been the historical response.”

– From the “Entering the CFO Mind (Map)” opening keynote session
Watch a summary broadcast

Janie Wade
CFO, Enterprise Operations, Intermountain Healthcare

“It’s going to be a lot of the same, faster. We’re the history tellers of the organization. But if we’re telling people on Sept. 15 what happened in August, it’s not really valuable. We need to be talking today about what’s happening in the business today so people can adjust quickly and adapt.”

“Pricing transparency. That’s a difficult law to comply with. The news blurbs say we’re not complying. I think everybody – or most everybody – is doing their best to comply. But there are some things in the media that are not helpful. They’re creating the perception that we don’t want to comply or that we’re not doing what we’re supposed to be doing. But it’s just difficult work to check all the different boxes.”

– From the “Entering the CFO Mind (Map)” opening keynote session
Watch a summary broadcast

Andrew Walker
Vice President, Accounting and Financial Reporting, WellSpan Health

“Health systems do a poor job at times of using a lot of acronyms. I’ve found that somebody may use an acronym, and it doesn’t mean what they think it means, and later it’s misconstrued by someone else. I’ve gotten very intentional about pausing meetings after someone throws out an acronym and saying, can we expand on that so that the team understands what you’re getting at.”

“Healthcare from an ESG [environmental, social, and governance] perspective is in a really good spot. A lot of healthcare is not-for-profit or religious-based. The big part is disclosure and figuring out what do we want to disclose. It’s getting credit for the things that we’re already doing.”

– From the “Strategic Leadership: Pivoting Through the Pandemic” breakout session
Watch a summary broadcast

Elizabeth Ward
Vice President of Finance, Beth Israel Lahey Health

“I prefer a partnership model to a vendor model. To me, the success of the partner should be aligned with my success.”

“If I can automate it, do I need to be doing it? What am I automating? Should I be extinguishing the need for the activity altogether?”

– From the “Strategic Leadership: Pivoting Through the Pandemic” breakout session
Watch a summary broadcast

Now you know what’s on the minds of healthcare CFOs. How do your thoughts compare with those of some of the leading healthcare CFOs in the country? Share them on Twitter @CroweUSA and on LinkedIn.