← Becker’s Healthcare Podcast
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- [00:00]
A
This is Andrew Cass with the Becker CFO and Revenue Cycle Podcast. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Patti Duane, CFO and treasurer of UW Health Northern Illinois. Patti, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.
- [00:13]
B
Thank you very much. I appreciate the time.
- [00:15]
A
Of course. Before we begin, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background?
- [00:21]
B
So my background is the first six years of my career I spent in public accounting. I worked for what is now known as Port PricewaterhouseCoopers as a CPA, and I did that work and found an opportunity to work for a local health care system. At the time, it was Swedish American Hospital, Swedish American Health System, which subsequently we were acquired. But I'll start with my career there. Started out as an accountant manager. I moved into an accounting director role. And then in 2015, we were acquired by the UW Health University of Wisconsin System out of Madison, Wisconsin. And at that time I was promoted to chief Financial officer. So I've served in that role since January of 2015. And during my time as CFO, my roles evolved. It started out with primarily all the traditional roles that you would have in a as a hospital healthcare system cfo. However, because of our relationship with uw, we were able to spin some things off that worked better in an integrated basis. For instance, revenue cycle, compliance, him. Some of the things that I had traditionally held that would normally be held by a hospital cfo, they were better performed as an integrated delivery system through one set of leadership, and those were transferred then that included both revenue cycle and some supply chain, as well as some regulatory and compliance functions. And since then, I have taken on additional roles that have allowed me to expand more into the operations area. And we recently acquired an ambulatory surgery center, which I am over the operations of the ambulatory surgery center, as well as have the opportunity to lead the pharmacy team for Northern Illinois. And those give me more exposure into operational areas. But at the same time, being a cfo, you have to be able to intersect with operations very well, because what one does, the other needs to understand in order to make the organization perform well.
- [02:40]
A
And with you wearing so many hats in different parts of operations and everything now, what are three of the top trends you're following in healthcare right now?
- [02:49]
B
So they're all really interrelated. Number one probably people think of most often is the financial pressures which are coming out of HR1, one big beautiful bill which aren't upon us right now. They are in the future. You know, we've got a little bit of lead time on them, but they definitely are on my mind. But weighing into that is the workforce. We do have challenges with workforce. We don't have as much the amount of outside labor or contract labor that we had during COVID which is great because it was an extremely expensive time, as everyone remembers that period of time. But we still find in particular some difficult to staff shifts, such as our evenings and nights, difficult to staff areas. Perhaps it's in a specialty area, like not necessarily nursing, but MRI techs or pharmacy techs, things that we need to keep the hospital running. So paying extra for premium labor or overtime, if you have existing staff who are willing to work overtime, both challenge the bottom line. So tied into that financial pressure are things like AI. You know, AI is a huge buzzword right now. And yes, it might be opportunity, opportunities for us to produce the work more efficiently in some ways. But I worry about the cost of AI because you have to be able to have an ROI there, right? You need to make sure that the reduction that you're going to have in costs of labor is going to be more than what the cost of AI is. And these are very expensive technologies. So that. That's weighing on my mind as well. The other thing that's weighing on my mind is the regulatory environment that we're in. You know, some regulations have been removed or improved. Others have been layered on. In particular, the scary part is cybersecurity. You know, you don't want to wake up in the morning and have a cybersecurity threat that has hit your health system and the cost of cyber insurance has gotten really, really high. But you also can't afford to have something go awry. So you have to have a significant investment in those cybersecurity prevention tactics in order to be able to avoid having that catastrophic event. But it seems like healthcare health systems are continuously under attack. We had a number of them that have been attacked in the recent years and multiple millions of dollars of waste that we have spent. The other thing for us in the state of Illinois, which is where I am located, we do not have malpractice caps. And if you are an injured party, I can understand why you wouldn't want those because you do want to be fairly compensated for any loss of life or any effects to your life. And, and I think that's fair. But the state of Illinois, because it doesn't have caps, seems to be a very heavy suit friendly state. And we have to sometimes practice defensive medicine because a lot of the lawsuits are failure to diagnose Lawsuits and medicine is complicated. So the fact that you have people suing for failure to diagnose something that doesn't get seen, isn't detected, you know, whether it's negligent or not is really the question. But that does drive up the cost of care for everyone, every organization, which ultimately we have to pass on to the consumers because we have to make some sort of bottom line to be able to arrest and reinvest in our people and our technologies that we have to have.
- [06:32]
A
And the next question I had for you is, what are you most excited about right now?
- [06:37]
B
Well, for me, I'm most excited about those opportunities that I have to go into operational. One of them, the surgery center that I talked about, we've had challenges with our gastroenterology line, and we basically outsource that to another group, third party, independent group. And all of those referrals were going to an outside party. And not only do we believe it's better for patient care to keep that within our system of care, but also we fund our primary care group. We incur significant investments, you want to call them losses in our primary care group, which is not unusual. All health systems invest in primary care, but the reason you invest in them is because you want to keep your population close to you and you have the ability then to recoup those investments by downstream revenues. So in this case, the gastroenterology line, we're not capturing those downstream revenues because it's going to a third party. So this is gives us an opportunity to not only be able to close the loop on those outside referrals, but also be able to provide better patient care to our patient population that we serve through our primary care group. So that one right now, it's an exciting time. It's a new service line for us. We also are adding procedures in our hospital setting. Not everything can be done in a surgery center. Some patients have comorbidities, et cetera. So we're standing this up within the hospital walls as well as the surgery center. So it's a very exciting time for us.
- [08:14]
A
And how are you thinking about growth over the next 12 months?
- [08:18]
B
Yeah, our growth is really going to be driven by those services that we can continue to provide to our patients that we serve through our primary care group. This is going to include, as I mentioned, gastroenterology, but it's also going to include orthopedics. We also have ventured into neurosurgery and improvements in cardiology. We are one of, I believe, five institutions across the country that have A physician that we've employed who performs robotic coronary artery bypass. It's exciting because that's an improvement in the patient recovery times and patient care and quality of care that we're able to provide to those patients. These are areas that we think will be strong growth for us. And as a community health system system, we believe that taking care of the patient as close to home is the best possible outcome we have not had in the past. The number of complicated procedures that we perform now and our case mix is reflective of that. In the past, you know, a lot of these things would go to other institutions, but we really have built up our specialty care in those areas that I talked about so that we're able to deliver that care to those patients right here at home in Rockford. So they do not have to drive to another location, whether it be Chicago or whether it be Madison or it be somewhere in another state or another health institution. So that's really the areas where we believe our growth will be driven. And our population is not growing within the service area that we service. It's pretty much flat. We do expect some potential growth in the future. Some manufacturing that's coming back to our area, a train that is supposed to be coming out to our area, but those are not going to drive huge amounts of population shift, we don't believe. So it's up to us to make sure that we deliver the best care possible to those patients. So they want to seek care with us within the market that we serve.
- [10:20]
A
Thank you so much for joining us today, Patti. It's been a pleasure speaking with you, and I look forward to talking with you again in the future.
- [10:26]
B
Yes, anytime. Thanks very much. Have a good day.