A report released today finds that chief financial officer's roles are becoming increasingly more complex as they guide their companies through changes in the healthcare industry.
The report titled "Healthcare change: Reform or transformation? A CFO perspective" by, Ernst & Young LLP, reveals CFO's perspectives on the top industry challenges based on 23 CFOs who participated in discussion forums earlier this year.
The CFO's outlined seven critical issues likely to reshape the industry in the future.
- Paying for healthcare: CFOs agree that curbing the escalating costs must be at the core of healthcare reform.
- Access to capital: CFOs have begun to seek greater consolidation of resources and organizations. They are looking to hospital mergers, gains in technology, leveraging with suppliers and negotiating with large insurance companies to bring savings.
- Physician relationships: CFOs are seeking to develop more mutually beneficial relationships with physicians to gain a competitive advantage and align with this stakeholder group on reforms. CFOs see the need to move toward hospital employment of physicians and joint ventures with physician-owned businesses.
- Workforce issues: CFOs are seeing the cost of healthcare labor skyrocket especially in the field of nursing where qualified nursing applications are turned away due to limited staffing.
- Quality and pay-for-performance: CFOs see P4P goals falling short with incremental improvements at best. CFOs have invested significant sums on quality measures, yet there are few measures to gauge long-term outcomes. The need is great, participants said, to involve doctors in the fabric of hospital leadership and to collectively take ownership for quality.
- The race for new technologies: CFOs say new technologies do not always produce improved outcomes or a return on investment. In response, CFOs see scale as one answer. As hospitals consolidate, duplication will be avoided, and expenses and technology purchases can be better leveraged.
- Transparency and community benefit: CFOs point to a very full and growing compliance agenda that must be managed and integrated into business operations.
"The urgency is accelerating to find solutions that better align the interest of payers, consumers, employers and providers," said Ian Morrison, healthcare futurist and leader of one of the Ernst & Young CFO forums. "Deep reform is needed to solve the issues of affordability and quality - transforming the delivery system to make it better, faster and cheaper than the one we have today."
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