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Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
Leading Transformation and Growth at UK HealthCare with Craig Collins
00:15:56
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- [00:02]
A
@ Athenahealth, we know your ambulatory practice wants healthier a healthier business, healthier care teams and healthier patients. But the complexities of modern healthcare tech make it hard for you and your care teams to focus on what matters most. That's where athenahealth can help our AI native all in one solutions reduce administrative burdens, streamline billing and payments, and deliver critical insights when clinicians need it most. That means fewer clicks, more time for patients, and stronger bottom Practicing medicine is complex, but running a practice can be that much simpler. With Athenahealth, see how simpler is healthier at athenahealth.com.
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B
This is Madeline Ashley with the Becker CFO and Revenue Cycle Podcast and I'm so excited to be joined by Craig Collins, Senior Vice President and CFO of UK Healthcare. Hi Craig. Thanks so much for joining me.
- [00:56]
C
Hey, good afternoon. It's a pleasure to join you and the folks from Beckers that listen and are my colleagues that are out there in healthcare. So I'm really glad to be here this afternoon.
- [01:07]
B
Yay. That is great to hear. I'm so excited to dive into everything. But before we do, I was hoping you might be able to share with our listeners just a little bit about yourself, your background, and more about UK Healthcare.
- [01:19]
C
Sure, that'd be a pleasure. So I started out my career as an accountant as a cost accountant at a general contractor in Des Moines, Iowa. And so I always use that as kind of being my foundation of learning the ropes of understanding cost, which I think is important regardless what industry you're in. I worked there for about 10 years and rotated around the country and did different things as that company continued to expand across the United States, but had a calling one day from the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and they were looking to expand their operations. They had some major construction they were doing across the country and so they wanted somebody that could understand construction and be that owner's rep. I started my journey in health care working at Mayo in the construction part of the organization, but that changed very quickly. I quickly moved into more and more of the support, financial support across that organization. I spent 25 years at Mayo. I ended my career there. The last eight years I was basically the enterprise revenue cycle leader for Mayo Clinic across all of their organizations. And the last two years I was their finance chair for Mayo Midwest. So I had a great, great opportunity to grow and to understand healthcare in that organization, but then had another chance to come here to the University of Kentucky. I have been here 10 years now. I started out as the associate vice president of finance. And within a year, they had an opening for the CFO position. And I really had the pleasure and the opportunity and really the honor to step into this role that I've been in for a little over eight years now. It's an exciting organization. I think the thing that to talk a little bit about the University of Kentucky. What I love about this organization is that we are one university, we are one organization who provide care and provide education and resources and support to the Commonwealth. And so when we think about our jobs, it's not just health care. We're working together in partnership with our academic colleagues. If you think through what we are and by the numbers, in some ways, we have 19 deans and colleges at the University of Kentucky. We have about 36,000 students. And we as UK Healthcare here in Lexington, for nine years in a row, we've been the best hospital in Kentucky. We think of ourselves as six hospitals. We have three. They're under the same provider number here at Chandler Hospital in Lexington, and then a hospital within the hospital, which is our children's hospital, and then Good Sam Hospital here in Lexington, which is about a mile down the road from us. But that's the organization here in Lexington. We manage a mental health hospital, Eastern State Hospital for the state that's here in Lexington. And then just recently, we were able to acquire two organizations in Eastern Kentucky. One in Ashland, King's Daughters, and then one in Morehead, St. Clair's Hospital that just was within the last year that have been a part of our partnership. We're about $5 billion in budget. We've got 1700 licensed beds. We do about 71,000 discharges. And if you think through just our focus of what we're all about, it's about serving the Commonwealth. And we've got about 41 specialties that are conducting outreach services to the Commonwealth of Kentucky. And we have about 250 to 260 partnering organizations. And so when you step back and think about us, that's what we're about. Our board actually approved in October an initiative that's called Advancing Kentucky. And it's where we're really committed as an entire enterprise to serving the Commonwealth by advancing care, taking care of our people and our partners, and also trying to be that distinction of an academic health system. So, in a nutshell, that's who we are.
- [05:44]
B
Amazing. No, thank you so much for sharing that that in depth background there. A lot to get to today on this podcast. You know, questions I have for you, just about some of the things you touched on, but I'd like to kind of start us off, you know, with your. With your background in healthcare and time spent at UK Healthcare, I would be so curious to hear maybe two to three trends that you're following right now in the ever evolving world of healthcare as we know, and. And maybe why these trends are so important to you.
- [06:12]
C
Sure. I think I've listened to some of the other podcasts and so I think we're very similar in many ways with other organizations that you've talked to. I think all of us in the CFO roles have been talking about. What's that? Digital transformation. What are we doing around expense growth and trying to make sure that our revenues are exceeding our expenses? I think there's the evolving healthcare landscape there that we all have to prepare for, not knowing anything about what the results might be at this point in time. And so I think it's very consistent in what many of us are looking at together as, as healthcare organizations. But I think we're all in different places and at different spots in our evolution of trying to, to work through those activities.
- [07:01]
B
No 100%. And you're right, you know, I think a lot of things that financial leaders have touched on with me, you know, do involve tech or even workforce shortages and issues that we're seeing right now. And also just following closely any potential policy changes as well. Is that something you're closely watching?
- [07:20]
C
We are very much watching the policy changes. You know, again, I think our response right now is we're modeling what many what ifs, but the focus is really going back to the bread and butter and how do you make this organization more efficient? And so we're really focusing on process improvements and how to become efficient regardless of what the outcomes might be.
- [07:42]
B
Right? Definitely. And probably something a lot of other systems are thinking as well. And again, you touched on it a little bit in the beginning, but I would love to hear what you're most excited about right now at UK Healthcare. I know in early February, I believe UK Healthcare put about 95 million towards Epic and Workday and some of those rollouts there with some software. So maybe if you could dive a little deeper there and kind of what that investment means to the system and anything else you're excited about, sure, that's.
- [08:11]
C
Great because I am very excited about that. And we. The project itself is called Project Blue Connect. Of course, we're the big blue nation, so we have to go along the terms of Blue. But Project Blue Connect is, as I pointed out, we installed EPIC here in Lexington for the Lexington based practice back in 2020, we acquired King's Daughters in 2021 and St. Clair in 2024. King's Daughters is on a different instance of epic and St. Clair is actually on Meditech. And so as we start to think about how to serve the patients of the Commonwealth, we want to get on a common platform. And so Project Blue Connect is that step of taking our instance of EPIC and then applying it across the other two entities. We're also working with EPIC Connect with a few of our other partners within the Commonwealth, but it is a major project of implementing EPIC across the entire organization. With that comes the opportunity to try to take the two new organizations and bring them under one ERP system. And so we are at this point in time, along with Epic, we're implementing Workday for both St. Clair and for King's Daughters. And so going with a big bang, we're looking at about an 18 month project. We plan to go live with Workday probably April 1st of 2026, and then stand EPIC up in the following July 1st to try to make sure that we have our feet up underneath us with the workday implementation before we connect and do that interface to epic. Along with that, we're really trying to make sure that we're securing the organization. And so we're. We're doing actually an identify identity access management implementation across the organization so that we can be secure and that we understand, you know, the users of our. Of our systems. So we're very excited about that and spending a lot of time right now in the foundational work of starting that implementation.
- [10:28]
B
That's really incredible to hear. And you know, for other systems that are looking to maybe do something similar, you know, implement EPIC or workday or similar software rollouts here, what advice would you have from them from a financial perspective?
- [10:43]
C
Well, I think one of the things that we're really focused around on this is that, yes, it's a big investment to do this, but the outcomes and the quality and just the opportunity to have shared data across the Commonwealth on our patients is one of the reasons that we're doing this. I mean, I think we're really having an opportunity to touch patients and to manage their care differently. So, as I said, we're going back to the basics in many ways around cost containment and around just process improvements. And how do we really start to step back and look at the delivery of care and how do we make sure that we're really focused on our ambulatory access and that we have a system wide process around that, that we're looking at care variation across all of the organizations. How do we transfer patients across this now new health system so that we can get patients home or closer to their families and the folks that are there to care for them after their hospitalization. And so I think understanding what's possible as you start to look at these big technology and change management implementations as.
- [12:02]
B
A healthcare organization and then along with this investment here, can you share a little bit more about what growth looks like to you in maybe the next 12 to 24 months, even at UK Healthcare?
- [12:18]
C
A couple different things that I'll share around growth. I talked about us advancing Kentucky together as an organization. And just as one example, because we are an academic medical center, we partner with our other college colleagues. One example of a thing that's very exciting right now is that we've partnered with our College of Agriculture and we're starting to stand up a food is health initiative where we're able to reach out and help those with food insecurities and really work through a process where we can provide them with some insight around healthy diets actually providing the food to them over a 12 week period. And we're just starting to stand that up. So I think, you know, how do we, how do we become and look at things a little differently and be more preventive in many ways on the way that we provide care to the, to the Commonwealth of Kentucky? The other thing we're doing is we have some major construction projects going on as part of my role as cfo. I also have facilities as a part of my assignment. We are currently under construction on about a $781 million cancer and ambulatory building. This will house our comprehensive cancer center, the Markey Cancer center, along with expanding some of our ambulatory activities, a surgery center and some different functions within that building. It's due to open up in 2027. I look out my window and I see four cranes underway for that project. And then we're currently in plans for an expansion of our hospital in 2033. It will be a replacement for our Good Sam Hospital and it will also provide us with another 256 incremental beds. All this said is to really support the opportunities for us to take transfer patients and provide that high level advance care to the Commonwealth, but then again be able to send those patients home to their environments into a safe environment for their post hospital care. So lots going on here as an organization. Our growth is really fast now.
- [14:39]
B
I was just about to say it really does sound like such an incredible time of growth for UK healthcare right now, and I really appreciate you breaking everything down for us here. Excited to see how things are going down the line and to connect with you again to talk about all these amazing projects and investments of the system. Craig, I so appreciate you taking the time. It's been a pleasure speaking and I look forward to connecting again.
- [15:03]
C
Sounds great. I'm really honored to have the opportunity to speak with you, so thank you so much for this time.
- [15:11]
A
At athenahealth, we know your ambulatory practice wants healthier a healthier business, healthier care teams and healthier patients. But the complexities of modern healthcare tech make it hard for you and your care teams to focus on what matters most. That's where athenahealth can help our AI native all in one solutions reduce administrative burdens, streamline billing and payments, and deliver critical insights when clinicians need it most. That means fewer clicks, more time for patients, and stronger bottom lines. Practicing medicine is complex, but running a practice can be that much simpler with athenahealth. See how simpler is healthier at athenaheal.