Mike Murrill
Chief Financial Officer
Adventist Bolingbrook Hospital
Bolingbrook, Ill.
You’ve recently been named CFO at Adventist Bolingbrook. What brought you to the position?
I started working for Adventist Health in the Denver area right out of college. I worked as a financial operations analyst in the perioperative department at Porter Hospital, working on cost containment. We also built 13 new operating rooms, so it gave me a chance to work on a lot of things operationally. Ultimately, I moved to Avista Hospital in Louisville, Colo., where I worked as a finance manager. In recent years I’ve worked in the Chicago area for Adventist Health facilities, and spent a lot of time in the budgeting process.
What are the unique challenges in your new role?
One of the main things is that we’re a relatively new facility – Bolingbrook is 3 years old – and we’re still going through some of the growing pains of a new hospital. I’m continuing to hardwire processes and to manage costs. I spend a majority of my time with our chief nursing officer working on delivering quality and efficient patient care. A lot of that comes down to refining day-to-day processes. The biggest change is to look at the big picture as CFO, rather than having a departmental focus.
Could you describe the nature of your discussions with the hospital CNO?
Part of it involves staffing the departments, but so much of it is process improvement. So much of what we talk about regards improving efficiency, determining how different departments can contribute to the overall quality of the patient stay. One thing we’ve dealt with recently is CPOE. That adds to the complexity of daily tasks for our nurses and physicians, but it has benefits for patient care. We’ve also added positive patient ID, which is a pharmacy initiative involving bar coding. We want to make sure that we give the right drug to the right patient 100 percent of the time. These are good initiatives, but they involve changes to processes that have to be managed.
What are some of the areas that are ripe for cost control in your facility?
Supplies are a huge cost driver. In areas like the surgery department and the cardiac cath lab we try to determine which supply items are used at what times, and make sure that we are optimizing our purchasing contracts.
How important to the CFO role is physician relations?
It’s very important. Physician alignment is already very integral to our hospital operations. I deal with physicians on the contract side, but also on the process improvement side. Many of my discussions with physicians are about how we can help make it easier for them to treat patients. It’s also inevitable that we’ll have capital investment needs around physician alignment. Nothing is set in stone yet, but it will happen.
To whom do you look for mentoring in your new role?
As a new CFO, I have a lot to learn. One big advantage is that I’m part of Adventist Health System, which has 40-plus hospitals around the country. We’re a very integrated system, so I have the opportunity to interact with CFOs and CEOs throughout the country on a pretty routine basis. Talk about a great opportunity for learning from those with experience!