CFOs' Leadership Role, Often Overlooked, Gets Some Sunshine

If you're a CFO reading this because you were attracted to the headline, I can read your thoughts:

"It's about time somebody noticed!" some little voice in your head has to be saying.

That's because when you're doing your job right, nobody seems to notice much. But we notice. In fact, CFOs are the linchpin behind a new HealthLeaders Media conference launching next month.

We're bringing 30 of the best and brightest healthcare CFOs together to an invitation-only retreat at Torrey Pines in Southern California to talk about the stresses and opportunities in today's rapidly changing healthcare business environment. I'll be one of the moderators at the event, and the location couldn't be better.

I'm hoping the ideas we kick back and forth over two days of intense focus will help us understand the important realities of the immediate and medium-term future as they affect hospitals and health systems—from the CFO's vantage point.

All right, I'll grant you, handling the money isn't the sexiest of jobs, but it's definitely one that has all the answers—at least your boss and the several thousand people who depend on your forecasts and decisions think so.

The CFO's desk is also the place where strategy meets execution. Once a major strategic change has been adopted, it's among your responsibilities to make sure there's proper investment and oversight to implement it effectively.

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.

It will be interesting to see what new ways our group of CFOs is monitoring and acting upon the big trends in the healthcare business, from ACOs to cost containment to ICD-10  to Value-Based Purchasing. The initial and most important decisions surrounding these macro trends in the industry will be made with considerable input from this group, and we plan to dig deep on their solutions, challenges and expectations for the coming years in healthcare.

We are in a period during which we'll see perhaps the biggest amount of change in history as healthcare moves from being a service provider and price setter to a value creator and service differentiator.