Ideas that work

Healthcare Financial Management, March, 2004

HFMA'S ANI 2004 Nashville

ANI: The Healthcare Finance Conference

June 27-July 1, 2004 Nashville, Tennessee Gaylord Opryland Resort & Convention Center

Education and Inspiration

Find real solutions to all of your organization's financial challenges--get inspired at ANI!

Are you struggling with Medicare billing compliance issues? Inadequate payment from government and commercial payers? Rising malpractice insurance premiums? Clinical staff shortages? The costs of updating facilities and equipment? Do you lie awake at night wondering how your organization can address all of these issues and still provide high-quality medical care?

You're not alone.

Healthcare financial professionals across the country face a variety of challenges, but those challenges all have one thing in common: They all directly affect the bottom line, which affects quality of patient care. To address these problems and optimize care, we need real solutions--real ideas that work in today's healthcare organizations. HFMA's Annual National Institute (ANI) is a proven, comprehensive educational event that will help you improve your organization's financial health and, consequently, the health of its patients. By bringing you and your colleagues together, ANI allows you to develop solutions by sharing ideas, building knowledge, and inspiring each other.

"ANI isn't just about education," says Benton Cash, Senior Manager, Billing/Contracting, at The Aroostook Medical Center in Presque Isle, Maine. "It's also a celebration of our association and the career path we have chosen. You will meet new friends who will share their tragedies and triumphs, and reaffirm your professional value to your organization and the people it serves."

Become a Leader in the Field

Whether you are a seasoned leader or working your way up to a management position, ANI can provide you with the resources you need to succeed. You can learn about improving employee and customer satisfaction, measuring and enhancing your organization's performance, collaborating with a variety of stakeholders, and acquiring other competencies that will help your organization and your career thrive.

Those benefits are exemplified in an ANI experience described by Suzanne Petru, Senior Vice President of Finance and CFO of Rockford Health System in Rockford, III. "A few years ago, when I was the CFO of a multihospital system," says Petru, "we were trying to get outside verification of an internal analysis that said one or two hospitals in our system might be headed for financial difficulty.

"I attended ANI, and at one of the seminars, a principal from The Hunter Group, a unit of Navigant Consulting, talked about 10 early warning signs to help identify if a hospital was headed for trouble," she says. "After ANI, I suggested we check to see if we could head off any potential financial difficulties. We ran all of our hospitals' data through the 'warning signs' metrics I learned at ANI. We found one that failed. Because we found the problems early, we were able to do a significant intervention in that facility to turn it around."

You can become a major factor in your organization's success with tools from ANI programs such as "Ten Performance Indicators for High Performing Hospitals," taught by Rudolph Braccili, Director, Global Services, for Siemens Medical Solutions Health Services Corporation. This program will teach you how to calculate each performance indicator and identify potential variations, and will provide you with practical suggestions for measuring and tracking key indicators at your own facility.

Another aspect of successful leadership is the ability to work well in partnership with a variety of stakeholders--patients, customers, physicians, and other executives.

"My role is that of a business partner to healthcare providers," says Mary Lee Kimball, Vice President, Healthcare Operations, for Omnium Worldwide, Inc., in Omaha, Neb. "For any partner to be successful, he or she must maintain current industry knowledge to be able to work closely with providers who are implementing the latest strategies, and those providers who may not have the opportunity to participate and depend on the partner's knowledge to facilitate change in their organization. With the information, materials, and resources gathered from ANI, I can work in parallel with those clients who are progressing with change, and I can be a bridge for those clients who are still gathering information.

"Quinton Studer's keynote address last year detailing the experience at Baptist Hospital in Florida brought home the basic concepts of how to achieve top customer service, in a tangible demonstration of success," Kimball says. "No matter what side of the industry they worked in, all participants benefited from this presentation. Studer's presentation detailed the improvements in customer satisfaction when his organization improved employee satisfaction. We are currently developing action plans in response to an associate feedback survey; the reference material from ANI was a perfect fit for this work."