With reimbursement more closely tied to quality of care and value-based care, chief financial officers are focusing on recovering working capital and finding new sources of revenue, according to a new survey of more than 150 health system CFOs.
SCI Solutions, a healthcare business process software company, conducted the survey in December 2014 and released the results on March 11.
The reports’ authors mentioned that approximately two-thirds of hospitals’ profits come from outpatient services. Ten years ago, outpatient services only accounted for approximately one-third of profits.
The survey’s respondents said the best ways to increase revenue include introducing new service lines of business, growing orders and referrals from independent provider practices, reducing network leakage and creating new community partner collaborations. To reduce costs, they recommended improving provider utilization management, centralizing and standardizing administrative functions and using information technology instead of manual processes.
Of the CFOs surveyed, 44 percent said the risk-adjusted return on their EHR investments was “adequate,” 19 percent said it was “less than acceptable” and 17 percent said the return was “unclear.”
When asked if they had a strategic focus with the provider community to drive outpatient growth, 50 percent said yes, 40 percent said somewhat, 8 percent said no and 2 percent said they didn’t know.
In addition, 64 percent of the respondents said they would collaborate with their community partners to generate more revenue.
Executive Editor
Tim Casey joined TriMed Media Group in 2015 as Executive Editor. For the previous four years, he worked as an editor and writer for HMP Communications, primarily focused on covering managed care issues and reporting from medical and health care conferences. He was also a staff reporter at the Sacramento Bee for more than four years covering professional, college and high school sports. He earned his undergraduate degree in psychology from the University of Notre Dame and his MBA degree from Georgetown University.