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Executive Roundtable | How are you reducing financial pressures in your organization?

We sat down with three healthcare executives to discuss how they are reducing costs and increasing revenue in their organizations. Here’s what they had to say.

ENCOURAGE EMPLOYEE INNOVATION TO INCREASE EFFICIENCIES

Margins have fallen dramatically across South Carolina, so we explain all the reasons why at quarterly employee forums. We've hosted close to 50 forums since 2004, and I think it's a big reason employees rate trust and communication so highly on our employee engagement surveys.

Recently, our president, Lorraine Lutton, asked all employees and physicians to become engaged in our challenge to cut costs and improve revenue. Management evaluated and selected ideas from several hundred submissions to implement in 2017 and 2018. In fact, we've built $15 million of these into our 2018 budget, which will be tracked as a metric on our corporate scorecard.

For example, frontline employees told us we needed to be more creative and proactive in point-of-service collections and that we needed to monitor charity care more closely to ensure we provided services in accordance with our policy. We also formed a contracts committee so that every contract is reviewed to see if we need it, if it's scoped correctly, or, especially in the case of renewals, if the cost can be reduced.

We are also focused on engaging physicians in this process in two ways. First, we have moved to an integrated physician network model where physician leaders are dedicating more of their time working shoulder to shoulder with senior leadership and becoming participatory in our cost cutting process. Physician leaders are the best leaders to bring efficiencies through protocols and standardization and garner support for such changes.

And secondly, we are focused on network integrity by asking our physicians to guarantee continuity of care for their patients by ensuring their care is completed within the Roper St. Francis network. We're doing our part to solve access issues they've raised, such as reducing wait times in outpatient physical therapies and sleep studies and ensuring women can complete digital mammography and bone density studies at the same time.

Brett Johnson, CFO Roper St. Francis, Charleston, SC

DRIVING ACCOUNTABILITY FOR RESULTS

"One of the things that's been most helpful is using Studer Group's Leader Evaluation Manager® (LEM) to plan performance for every leader in the organization to ensure we activate our plan on January 1, instead of wasting time adjusting goals in the first couple months of the year. While the year-end evaluation aspect of the tool is, of course, vital, it's really the performance planning and management ability of LEM that drives those results through ongoing critical conversations.

We spend a lot of time developing goals, cascading them to ensure alignment and then creating specific linkages among all leaders. The built-in accountability gives us a way to assess our accumulating results month-by-month throughout the year to make adjustments in real time so we stay on plan. We've made great gains in growth, contribution margin and workforce productivity by keeping our thumb on the pulse of what's actually occurring."

Dave Molmen, CEO Altru Health System, Grand Forks, ND

GAINING MARKET SHARE THROUGH MEDICAL GROUP PRACTICE GROWTH

As a small community hospital, we're finding that partnering with more physicians has been an effective way to reach more patients and grow market share. We've acquired or built 20 additional health center sites over the past seven years, which has contributed to annual growth in our outpatient and ancillary services (e.g., labs, imaging, diagnostics).

We've also dramatically improved referrals by truly partnering with physicians. For example, when we noted significant leakage in outpatient therapy referrals, we asked the manager of therapy to meet individually with physicians to understand what it would take to become their preferred provider. We turned it around by solving access issues and reducing the paperwork burden. These days, physicians approach us to discuss partnerships because they know we are transparent and committed to their success.

Mark Steadham, CEO Morris Hospital, Morris, IL
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