Becker's Hospital Review

98 THOUGHT LEADERSHIP 'It's about gathering all the essential data so we can make qualified decisions': Q&A with Porter Health Care System CFO Jeff Daneff By Kelly Gooch J eff Daneff is familiar with the evolving CFO role. He cur- rently serves as CFO of Valparaiso, Ind.-based Porter Health Care System, where he oversees more than 2,200 employees across two hospital campuses, seven outpa- tient facilities and an in-house ambulance company. Prior to joining Porter in May 2017, he was CFO of Terre Haute (Ind.) Regional Medical Center. He also previously served as the assistant CFO/controller at Oro Valley Hospital and Northwest Medical Center in Tucson, Ariz., after beginning his healthcare career with Englewood, Colo.-based Catho- lic Health Initiatives. Here, Mr. Daneff discusses the challenges facing CFOs to- day and what he enjoys about his role. Note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity. Question: What skills are essential for a health system CFO in today's healthcare climate, beyond traditional financial and business acumen? Jeff Daneff: I think it's the ability to make justifiable deci- sions promptly. The pace of healthcare right now is such that you don't necessarily need to be first to market with a new idea, but you need to be able to make quick deci- sions, particularly if the data is there. Q: What is the greatest challenge facing hospital and health system CFOs today? JD: I would say the greatest challenge is in educating the rest of the team. We have to tend to hospitals in the same fashion a farmer would treat their crops. In order to do that, you need to know the constraints and limitations of your resources. In the farming realm, we call that the soil. But we need to know the constraints because our hospital is not able to take on every service or initiative, whether it's joint ventures [or something else]. So, it's how you educate the team on, "This is our hospital. This is what may make sense for us to get into." It's about gathering all the essential data so we can make qualified decisions and not simply play the tit-for-tat game of, "Well, the health system down the street got this new piece of equipment, so we should get it too in order to stay competitive." Q: As the healthcare industry shifts to value-based payments, what is the biggest challenge your system faces? What strategies are you employing to meet this challenge? JD: There are internal and external strategies. The external is always going to be your competitors and the landscape there. You can imagine outside of every for-profit hospital is a myriad of nonprofit hospitals that could begin competing or could set up satellite offices in our area as it pertains to competition. On the internal side, the biggest challenge is turnover in the administration realm. Since I've been here, we've had a 100 percent transition in administrators — new CEO, CFO, COO, CNO, and new chief quality officer — all of this has happened in the last 12 months. So, the biggest thing for us [as Porter leaders] is to take all of our external ex- periences and come in here with a clean slate and an open mind of, "What do we see that's working? What do we see that can be put up as a prioritization down the line?" When you have this many new leaders in a hospital, you see many areas of opportunity, but it's really prioritizing what's going to fit within the overall strategic plan and what makes sense in the short term versus the long term. Q: In the wake of those challenges, what do you enjoy most about being CFO? JD: I like the ability to translate data into opportunities and to translate those opportunities into action. As much as CFOs focus on expense initiatives, I would say the CFOs I know really enjoy doing the revenue enhancement [anal- ysis] and figuring out how to grow the hospital organical- ly. The misnomer in this industry is that you have to hire, acquire, start new service lines to grow, but most missed opportunities I've seen are in not tending to existing re- sources or service lines. Q: Do you have anything else to add about the CFO role today? JD: There's a quote I think goes well with the CFOs of to- day by David Livingstone, who said, "Sympathy is no sub- stitute for action." It'd be real easy for us [as CFOs] to just always focus on expenses and [let others at the hospital] take care of patient care and quality initiatives, but I think it's part of my job to try to help out in taking on some of those initiatives, whether it's coordination of care manage- ment or in readmissions efforts. n CD: Nurse managers have a tremendous im- pact on both nurse and patient outcomes. But we don't always prepare nurse managers for how to be successful. We pluck great health- care providers out of their clinical role and put them in a management role, expecting them to automatically be great managers, too. We show them how to budget and schedule and then say, "Go to it." But we're not teaching them how to lead, mentor and develop a team. So I think fo- cusing on leadership development is important. Team building is also important. We unite peo- ple with different experience levels and cultural norms all together in a unit or office and chal- lenge them to achieve quality outcomes, but we don't give them a chance to become a cohesive team. is goes back to making sure leaders un- derstand team members have to be at the table to help them. In a hospital unit, you can't just get the nurses together. You also have to include all the people who help take care of patients on that unit, including environmental services, the lab and pharmacy. n

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