4 True Tales of Successful Financial Leadership

I spend a lot of time interviewing healthcare leaders about financial strategies. Sometimes I look at the big ideas, such as the effect accountable care organizations may feel on their margin. Other times I look at the low-hanging fruit that any financial leader would be thrilled to find and put back into a budget. Whether the task is large, such as ACOs, or smaller, such as revenue cycle quick-fixes, all have a common thread: in order to achieve success critical and abstract thinking must be applied.

I'm always enthralled to come across stories that describe, in practical terms, how leaders actually lead. As the saying goes, tough times define us and in the last few years with the downturned economy followed by the enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act more than a few leaders have redefined what it means to be a healthcare leader.

Here are four of my recent favorites and must-reads for all healthcare leaders:

1. How a CEO Empowered Staff to Save $3M and Their Jobs
   During the recession, Chicago's Swedish Covenant Hospital chief Mark Newton was unwilling to take draconian measures such as layoffs. Instead, he deployed a tactic from his entrepreneurial background: He challenged his staff to find ways to cut costs themselves. In Part 2, Newton details measures taken by hospital staff to meet his challenge, and divulges the wider benefits of leading through a crisis by engaging and empowering employees. Great stuff by my colleague, Philip Betbeze, and a must-read for all hospital and health system CFOs.
2. How to Make Millions in Hospital Revenue Reappear
   I wrote this one myself, but it's both a practical treatise on charge capture and a morality tale about the value of consistency. I relay the story of Christus Health in Irving, TX one of the largest Catholic Health Systems, which decided to prioritize consistency in the charge capture of its emergency department levels and injections/infusions and wound up recovering a whopping $29 million in net revenue.

3. How Scripps Health Brewed Up a Plan That Saved $350K
   This one, by Cheryl Clark, weighs in on a slightly smaller scale, but is no less rewarding, unless you're counting dollars exclusively. An audit of the food and beverage services at Scripps Health in San Diego last year uncovered enormous variation and expense throughout its five hospitals in just one little perk. The coffee. Seems some hospitals were sipping free "fancy" coffees while others had to make do with the cheap stuff. Long story short: Java consolidation saved $350K in year one. That kind of savings should give any financial leaders a wake up call.
4. Bleeder to Feeder: How an ED Turned Its Business Around
   The challenges at one Texas hospital's emergency department were numerous, but they all boiled down to a left-without-being-seen rate of 8-10%. Here's how hospital leaders re-engineered the department and its processes and stopped seeing business walk out the door. Jonathan Davis, president of Methodist Charlton Medical Center in south Dallas tells Philip Betbeze that he accomplished all this by invoking his philosophy of solving problems internally when possible. "Our lesson here," he said," is we're not spending money on a facility when we can't improve the process within it."