Roundtables

Hospitals Feeling the Squeeze: 4 CFOs on today's Most Pressing Financial Issues At IntelliCentrics, our sole purpose is to protect the health and safety of your patients and staff. Our Preptrax TM system has quickly become the industry standard for vendor credentialing. Now, we're introducing staff credentialing a, medical and nonmedical staff training, and visitor management solution that further simplify the world of regulatory compliance and drive even more costs out of healthcare. got about 75 percent of vendors that came back with price cuts. We lever- aged the changes in healthcare and cuts in government reimbursement. DN: We're probably a little more fortunate, as we are part of a system. Within our GPO, our physicians get to be consultants on the selection com- mittees. So we get one to two physi- cians from our hospital to look at and evaluate supplies and implants before they are mandated for the facility. at's a big plus, and this physician inclusion hasn't been happening in past. We also have a local facility fiscal responsibility committee that gets together on a monthly basis to review all new products. is committee is a multidisciplinary committee of all our major clinical care directors, to look at new supplies, surgical packs, etc. en we take their feedback back to vendors under the GPO to make sure they meet the needs and quality. With physician credentialing, every hospital within our system has done their own credentialing with its med- ical staff in the past. We are currently putting together a central credential- ing office. I'm in western Wisconsin with two facilities here. e eastern di- vision has three other facilities. We're going to consolidate the credentialing process so we have a central office for all our facilities with a standardized process. We will still have an FTE on- site at each facility because you have to have interactions with physicians. RR: We actually are part of an in- formal consortium of hospitals, even though we're independent. e independent hospitals in Oregon have gotten together and specifically have gotten together to look at physician preference items. at tends to work really well for implants. e hardest thing, though, is to make sure your physicians don't feel like they are get- ting dictated to. If you can show them [items are] clinically the same and that outcomes are better or as good as what they had, they are generally pretty interested and wiling to help. ey are cooperative and know they are not here if we are not here. is has helped because vendors don't care about one hospital as much as seven or so hospi- tals coming together. It's pretty unique and pretty cool how we've all come together and share our information for the good of the whole. It's not easy, but if you keep at it, you can achieve substantial savings. Q: How do you plan on handling the increasing budgetary and regulatory compliance pressures? For example, how do you ensure savings in staff credentialing, staff training and visitor management delivers without compromising those processes? GE: We understand the nature of com- pliance, quality and education, and we still allocate a portion of the budget to those areas. We can't go back and let staff and providers lose ground and become ineffective or dangerous. It's something that we don't cut. We try to manage it and are doing it appropri- ately. We still think it's vitally import- ant we stay up on new regulations, technologies and therapies, because that's what makes us good. DN: Staff credentialing is handled by our HR department. From a staff training perspective, we have brought in some key clinical and compliance instructors. is allows us to train nurses and staff without a lot of addi- tional travel costs. Because we're close enough to the Twin Cities, we are for- tunate to get instructors to make that hour drive and provide these types of services, as we have had to tighten down the budget on travel and educa- tion expenses. RR: We have trouble with that being a smaller hospital. We don't have a lot of overhead, and thus everybody helps in the compliance area. We aren't part of chain where we can call corporate to deal with compliance. We try to do it more by committee, help each other out and farm it out when necessary. I don't know if that's typical, but I think smaller places have to do it that way. n

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