Dixie Regional was recently named one of the Thomson Reuters Top 100 U.S. hospitals. What are some factors that contribute to excellence?
Some of it has to do with the fact that we’re part of Intermountain Healthcare. Intermountain has developed a culture that strives on best practices. We want to do high quality work in the most efficient way possible. We want to provide the best care at the lowest appropriate cost. We measure our CMS scores monthly. We look for best practices at low costs, to drive out variations. And we have a real dedicated group of administrators who sincerely care about each other.
What are some of the things your finance team does that has helped lead to Dixie Regional's success?
In the last two or three years we felt we had grown a bit complacent, so we made some changes on the finance end. We realized that finance had to be a partner with operations. As a result, we aligned our finance staff with our operations officers and developed tools for our directors, managers and operations officers to work on finance and clinical goals together. We pair finance staff with operations officers to review budget issues. We place a great deal of emphasis on capital budgeting so it links with strategies. We review our financials and measure our staffing levels daily.
We created a physician clinical council. The physician leaders from all our clinical areas meet once a month to go over finances in those areas. There is such a tight link between finance and clinical now. When we first linked finance and clinical directors, our finance team visited these clinical areas. We want our finance team to understand how equipment is used by clinicians, how the departments are operating. Getting our finance people more clinically oriented has been really beneficial.
What suggestions and/or best practices would you offer to other hospital CFOs to help improve overall quality and financial performance?
One of the things I’ve learned in the last five years is that CFOs need to get out of their offices. To be successful, CFOs need to spend more time with the operations team, one-on-one and in meetings. We need to understand the challenges that are being faced by operations. Conversely, the operations teams need to understand our finance issues. It’s key that you have good working relationships. Downstream benefits will flow from those relationships. You can work with your finance team to involve them in best practices, helping them learn what tools are necessary for management. It’s also important to have a very strong management engineer, who is looking at your workflows and understanding how to become more efficient. The link between finance and operations is the key to this.