The Exec: Building Agility with CFO Laurie Beyer

Bigger isn't always better, says the chief financial executive of a Baltimore-based hospital.

For Laurie Beyer, taking her financial expertise into healthcare just made sense.

Beyer joined GBMC HealthCare as vice president and CFO in October 2017, bringing more than 25 years of experience in accounting and healthcare to the Baltimore-based hospital.

"You can make a difference if you're really helping a community carry out the mission; that's what is attractive to me," she says. "Even though I'm the one who has to tell people 'no,' at the end of the day, our decisions are driven by making sure patients are taken care of, that we provide high quality care, and that we keep people safe."

Beyer previously worked at Union Hospital of Cecil County, a 125-bed rural hospital in northeast Maryland. She served as senior vice president and CFO for 11 years, and after transitioning to GBMC, a much larger system, she found that bigger doesn't always mean better.

"I found that when I got here to GBMC, some of the things that we did at the smaller hospital were actually better than here," she says. "So size isn't always best. Because actually the smaller you are, the nimbler you are to make decisions."

Because GBMC HealthCare is much larger, Beyer's work involves larger operational plans and strategies. But she says the organization has found agility in other ways, including by remaining independent.

"We are nimble here because we're still independent," she says. "We have an affiliation with Johns Hopkins for certain services that we don't provide or that we don't employ, but for the most part we are independent."

But there's more to the concept of agility for a health system than simply making decisions independently. Beyer says building a strong, skilled team, especially within the finance department, is a big component, particularly for reimbursement.

Maryland is exempted from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services' Inpatient Prospective Payment System (IPPS) and Outpatient Prospective Payment System (OPPS) due to a Medicare waiver. This allows the state to set its own hospital reimbursement rates, ensuring all payers pay the same amount for services.

When Beyer joined GBMC HealthCare, the organization was spending close to $1 million on outsourcing financial services. To navigate this challenge Beyer recruited two seasonsed leaders to create a high-functioning internal reimbursement department, she says. Building the right skill sets to tackle the system's specific challenges is vital. Beyer says CFOs can help educate staff by holding educational meetings throughout the finance division for the managers as well as the staff to explain the elements of the operation, how they fit in and how they impact the financial results.

"Make sure that you've got the right team, establish relationships with your peers, [and] be available and be present," she says. "It's important to establish relationships so that when you do have a crisis that you can come together and solve it quickly."

As healthcare becomes more nuanced, with more operational and regulatory factors to consider, CFOs are realizing that collaboration Is essential. Building agility within the finance department means bringing together a team that can work together when needed and still use their individual skill sets to get things done. Beyer says collaborating with her COO, CMO, CIO and CNO helps her to have a solid understanding of all the areas of the hospital and it's operations. "I am an active participant on our strategy group and lead various initiatives. I meet regularly with each of the Senior leaders to offer assistance and feedback on their business plans," Beyer says. 

"Early in my career when I didn't really know what it would take to be a CFO, there was a tendency to want to make decisions in isolation," she says. "But over the years, I've learned that you need to be part of the strategy group and just make sure that you're in tune with the strategy so that you can actually help with deployment of resources."