ANI 2011: Finance leaders must balance cost, quality

How can healthcare finance executives drive value for their organizations?

That question will be front and center at the upcoming “ANI: The Healthcare Finance Conference,” sponsored by the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) and slated for the Gaylord Palms Resort & Convention Center in Orlando, Fla., from June 26-29.

According to Todd Nelson, director of senior financial executives/accounting at HFMA, “executives are looking for multiple ways to drive value,” which he defined as “the notion of improving quality while driving down costs, in every facet of their organization. As hospitals prepare for new payment models under reform, as well as new organizational models, they are focusing on clinical transformation, revenue cycle improvements, and collaboration with all of the stakeholders within the healthcare environment.”

Among the speakers scheduled to offer advice to healthcare finance executives from around the country are keynoters Maureen Bisognano (pictured at right), CEO of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, and Peter Orszag, former director of the federal Office of Management and Budget.

Also scheduled to speak is Benjamin K. Chu, MD (pictured below), regional president of Kaiser Permanente Southern California, who will describe a number of strategies hospitals can use as they work to increase quality and reduce overall costs by using information technology to enhance and support coordinate care.

Specifically, Dr. Chu said, his talk “will center on how health information technology – and in particular population and panel management tools that are built around evidence-based algorithms – can identify ‘gaps in care’ for large populations of patients.”

The more important issue, he said, “is how our delivery system responds to this newly accessible knowledge. An integrated delivery system can bring systems-level changes that can leverage this information to markedly enhance outcomes of care for the people we take care of. In the process of transforming care delivery through systematic use of information to drive performance, we can restore joy in caring for patients at a time of great uncertainty.”

For Keith Boyd, president of HFMA’s North Carolina chapter, the primary question on his 900+ members’ minds is “what form is healthcare reform finally going to take and how is that going to affect us operationally?”

The director of revenue of cycle management for Raleigh, N.C.-based Rex Healthcare, Inc., Boyd pointed to the ongoing lawsuits and political debates concerning federal healthcare legislation.

“Nobody is 100 percent sure what elements we’re going to have to do . . . and how we’re going to manage it,” he said.

Consequently, Boyd said, his members are wondering “what do we need to be positioning ourselves for now for when the changes begin en masse.”