CFOs' Leadership Role, Often Overlooked, Gets Some Sunshine

Further, CFOs are bringing a variety of new talents to a job that only historically looks rote and boring. They are becoming de facto business development experts in addition to their role in allocating and monitoring expenses and income.

We've done some pre-event surveying to check the pulse of our group on a bunch of trends in healthcare, and although we're keeping a pretty tight lid on the results for now, I did see one or two that I feel compelled to mention.

For instance, our group of CFOs seems pretty confident that CMS's Value-Based Purchasing initiative won't sound the death knell for their institutions, though it might cause a little belt-tightening.

In fact, in the first year the incentives are put into place, 2013, nearly 20% of our group expects to see revenue gains compared to the prior year. More than 50% thinks its revenues will be flat—no cause for celebration, yet a surprising result in its own right —while about 30% think the initiative will cause a net loss compared to the prior year.

In another question, answers were perhaps not so shocking. For example, our CFOs predict that HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) will give them the most difficulty in reaching improvement or performance incentives—far ahead of such other choices as hospital-acquired infection measures or heart failure measures.

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