← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
At Insight Global Health, we are dedicated to helping you and improving healthcare for everyone. That means building stronger teams and delivering sustainable solutions that truly make a difference. We offer a full spectrum of talent and technical services and deliver cross industry expertise to bring you innovative best practices to solve the problems that we face in healthcare. We're not just promising you results, we are delivering them. Visit us@insightglobal.com this is Gracelyn Keller with.
- [00:28]
B
The Beckers Healthcare Podcast and we are live at the 15th annual meeting. I am joined right now by Brenda McCormick, who is the Chief Financial Officer at Children's Minnesota. So Brenda, thanks for being here. We'd love to have you start off by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit more about your background in healthcare and your organization.
- [00:46]
C
Yeah, great. Thank you, Grace. And thank you for having me. So, as you mentioned, my name is Brenda McCormick. I'm the chief, Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President at Children's Minnesota. Children's Minnesota is one of the largest freestanding nonprofit pediatric systems in the nation. And we're the only one exclusively dedicated to kids in Minnesota. In fact, Last year in 2024, we celebrated our 100 year anniversary of providing great care to kids in our region and our state. Children's Minnesota has two hospitals. They're really located in the urban core of the Twin Cities, one in Minneapolis and one in St. Paul. And we also have an ambulatory surgical center that's on the west side of our city and numerous primary care, rehab and specialty care clinics in the area. We have one of the busiest emergency departments for pediatrics. We see nearly 90,000 visits a year and we see about 9,500 births of just those smallest infants that need our level three and level four nurseries. And so we're a pretty busy system. My responsibilities span finance, strategy and business development, supply chain, real estate and innovation. And I work very closely with our Chief Medical officer and Chief Nursing officer in managing the day to day operations. Interestingly, my background isn't in health care. Prior to joining Children's Minnesota In 2019, I was the CFO of a global medical device organization and I started my career in consumer foods, actually working for organizations like Coca Cola and the Pillsbury Company. And then I stay active in the community. I represent Children's on the Ridgeview Medical center board. I'm also a regent for St Olaf College and I'm the Vice Chair of our local Animal Humane Society.
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B
Wonderful. Well, thank you for being here. And let's start our conversation. In the last 12 months or so, what's an initiative you've taken on that you are particularly proud of. And how has that impacted your organization?
- [02:47]
C
One of the initiatives I am so proud of is leading the strategic planning process. As we were emerging from the pandemic about two and a half years ago, I picked up the strategy, growth and innovation responsibilities for the organization. And right away I wanted to set a longer term vision, something that the organization could rally around and help us make those key strategic decisions and everyday decisions, actually. And this was important because the organization hadn't really taken the time or pause to step back to talk about what our future could look like as an independent pediatric provider. And so this was so important for the organization and it was really a lot of fun too. We, we're so collaborative. We worked across our organization, our community, and with our patients and families. And of course we did the normal economic scan and environmental review and looked at our trends. But what we also did is we asked each of our clinical leaders for our key service lines to do a very detailed SWOT analysis and a positioning statement. And this helped us to really understand those strategic realities, those that could accelerate our vision, but those that also might be something that would be a hurdle. And that led into a very detailed positioning review of all of our services. So once we had that, then we could embark on our three year strategic plan, focused on that aspiration. And that aspiration really is about being the premier provider of pediatrics in our region and being independent and financially sustainable, which was a key attribute to that vision. And then differentiating on experience, not just for our patients and families, but for our providers, referring providers, really anyone who touched our system. And so once we had that and we embarked on our three year strategic plan that we just rolled out starting in January of this year, it helped us to make some really critical decisions. And one of those was to evaluate our emr. We had or have a kind of a disparate system of multiple EMRs. It makes it complicated to use. And we made the decision to move to epic. So a large investment for our organization and we'll be starting that implementation this summer.
- [05:09]
B
Wonderful. And then kind of on the flip side of that, what do you see as the most significant challenge currently facing the healthcare industry? And how are you working to address it?
- [05:20]
C
Yeah, there are so many challenges, you know, being in health care for just five years. I would say every year has brought something new and I would say it's kind of threefold, all really resulting in impacts to our financial margins. The first is provider pressures. The second are workforce challenges. And the third are really just increasing costs. And so if we kind of dive into each of those on the provider pressures. Being a pediatric health system, we have almost 50% of our patients and families are on Medicaid. And Medicaid in Minnesota only reimburses at about 70% of the actual cost. And over the last several years, we've seen the Medicaid percentage grow about 600 basis points. And so that puts real strain on our organization to figure out what to do with those uncovered costs. In addition, we have a very concentrated commercial payer market. And so that makes it more difficult to negotiate inflationary increases with our payers. And we're seeing additional delays in payment and higher denials. So those are all things that can impact our cash flow. On the workforce side, we have seen improvement over the last 12 months. As far as hiring goes, we're fully staffed at this point. We don't have any temporary labor in our system. But it's been really a hurdle. And we know that schools are not keeping up with the demand that we need for health care. And particularly in pediatrics, we're seeing a reduction in those residents that are choosing that for their field of study. And that will have a significant impact on us as we move forward. And then finally, those tight margins, obviously all of those things can contribute to it. But in addition, with the potential tariffs and the supply chain and pharmaceutical cost increases, it's. It becomes really challenging. And we're not able to pass those on, obviously because we're have payer contracts and they're very reluctant to open those up. And then also we just know that our government payers haven't kept up with inflation over the years. Just makes it difficult overall.
- [07:29]
B
And then as a leader yourself, I'd love to know what leadership lesson you've learned recently or are currently learning that you'd like to share.
- [07:38]
C
Sure. So one of the things that I reflect back on is earlier in my career I was in the food industry. So consumer foods and I shifted to a technology company. So I had been in consumer foods about a decade, and I really wanted to see how my business and finance skills would transfer outside of that industry. So I joined a technology company that was focused on enterprise resource planning, software development and implementation. And the great thing was I saw that the finance and business acumen did transfer. But the key learning was I was no longer sort of the expert on how the systems worked and how really on that industry or how you got things done. And so I really needed to work through my team and others at the organization. In my prior company, I could just kind of hop into the system, pull what I needed, do the insights and just kind of move along. And so that shift was really important. And I think at an important time in my career, moving from being more of the doer to being more of a leader, working to delegate, kind of set that longer term vision and motivation and really empower and trust my team. And I've kept that throughout my leadership. And I just find it so helpful as you're moving through and growing in your leadership, to really lean into influencing influence beyond your span of control, really bringing your insights, working with others as a team and empowering those so that we can accomplish more together than alone.
- [09:05]
B
And then finally, I'd love to touch on workforce as we round out our conversation. So workforce challenges do remain the number one issue for many leaders in the health care industry. So how are you addressing these within your organization?
- [09:19]
C
Yeah, that's such a good question, Grace. We've done a number of things over the last year. One thing I'll just mention is we are a magnet organization, so we invest quite heavily in nursing and we're very proud of that. But that's not enough. And so with the turnover that we saw following the pandemic, we really doubled down our efforts on our recruiting. So looking at different ways to recruit, doing state interviews with people to understand why are they staying, what is that engagement. And that has been really insightful and it's changed some of our recruiting strategies. We do more boomerang campaigns now. We're reaching further out than just our metropolitan area on recruiting. And we're partnering much more with schools, whether those are community colleges or universities, to make sure that we have a voice at that school and can even help frame the the teaching and the curriculum. And that's been really powerful and something we'll continue to double down on. I think it's such an important question too, because health care is such an integral part to all communities. When we look at at Children's Minnesota, for instance, we're a top 25 employer for the state and most healthcare systems that are larger than us obviously are in the top 25. And so when we struggle to recruit or bring talent in, it has a real and direct impact on the economic viability of our community.
- [10:43]
B
Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to join me today on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. Again, we are recording live at the 15th annual meeting.
- [10:52]
C
Thank you, guys.