3 Strategies of Financially Successful CAHs

One CFO Pink interviewed trains and educates every department head to ensure that they understand the financial workings of their department. "She brought each one of them in and said, 'Here's your financial statement for your department. Tell me what it means.' Most of the people really couldn't tell her," Pink says. That CFO follows up her training with tests every few months.

In addition to conducting research into what makes CAHs financially successful, Holmes and Pink are also part of the Flex Monitoring Team that is developing a model for hospitals to determine their risk for financial distress. By assessing their organizations using Risk of Financial Distress Among Critical Access Hospitals: A Proposed Model and implementing some of the success strategies outlined in the research, Holmes and Pink believe CAHs will have a better shot a financial viability.

"For some of them, it may be the case that they may still be at risk of distress even if they implemented all this," Holmes says. "But we certainly believe that they would be at lower risk."