Becker's Hospital Review

28 Executive Briefing Envision Physician Services is a multispecialty physician group and healthcare management team providing anesthesia, emergency medicine, hospital medicine, radiology, surgical services, and women's and children's health services. Our collective experience enables us to better solve complex problems and consistently give healthcare organizations confidence in our execution. Envision Physician Services serves more than 780 healthcare facilities in 48 states and the District of Columbia and employs or contracts with more than 16,000 physicians and other healthcare professionals. To learn more call 855-584-4878 or visit EnvisionPhysicianServices.com. Hospitals and health systems employ data analytics systems to increase efficiencies and improve clinical workflows. This operational data illustrates how well a hospital is running, but it also reveals what patients experience on a regular basis. For instance, CFOs can glean insights about the patient experience from metrics on wait times, arrival-to-bed times, arrival-to- provider times and other operational data. CFOs can evaluate these metrics to determine how financial decisions affect the patient experience. "CFOs are seeing the value in employing analytics to make sure they are connecting with individual patients," said Dr. Maccioli. "Customer feedback has made healthcare undergo a global 360-degree feedback loop, as patient satisfaction ties in to everything — from the hospital environment to the staff working environments and retention." The dynamic between CFOs and physicians A hospital's patient engagement strategy involves all members of a patient's care team, each of whom must fully understand his or her role in upholding an excellent experience. While finance teams are not directly involved in bedside interactions, their strategic decisions create the environment and circumstances under which clinicians and patients interact. With that in mind, CFOs are key stakeholders in patient engagement initiatives. As the chief quality officer for the largest physician services company in the country, Dr. Maccioli understands the importance of collaboration between clinical and financial leaders. "CFOs need to work with physicians and nursing leadership to review data and find the 'low-hanging fruit' — what are the pressure points for patients?" he said. "Investments need to be made from the patient's point of view, but with the critical operational oversight from physicians and nursing staff. In the past, hospital leadership and physicians have not been as closely aligned. Now, we are all in this together." This new relationship will take time and work on behalf of CFOs. It is not enough to commit to the cause upfront only to let the clinical-finance disconnect of the past seep back into the organization. CFOs must also recognize that clinicians have a financial stake in patient satisfaction as well. "If the CFO goes on this [patient satisfaction] journey without the engagement of their physician staff, it's doomed for failure," said Dr. Maccioli. "Patient satisfaction is a strategy to improve direct patient care and financial performance. Physicians need to be a part of the strategy and not an afterthought, which requires the CFO to work in collaboration with staff." Despite the shift from volume to value, many physicians are not wholly sold on value-based models' ability to yield superior clinical outcomes. A 2017 Front Line report found more than 70 percent of physicians prefer a fee-for-service payment model and more than 60 percent of physicians say it will become more difficult to deliver high quality care within the next two years.3 Dr. Maccioli believes that if physicians cannot align themselves with executives' vision of how their hospital will move forward in a value-based payment model, they will be standing in the way of their own success. A final way that the CFO-clinician relationship must evolve pertains to talent. Because CFOs have the final say over investments, they should ensure care teams have not only sufficient financial resources, but a high-performing network of top talent. This comes down to assessing the quality of a care team just as much as its associated costs. "An institution will only be as successful at maximizing quality payments — or adversely, avoiding material penalties — as the human and financial capital that is resourced to accomplish the task," said Dr. Maccioli. Conclusion CFOs protect the vital assets of any company. For hospitals and health systems, the patient experience is as vital as an asset gets. In many ways, it is surprising that CFOs weren't widely seen as patient champions all along. Nonetheless, they are now — and they'll need rich relationships to thrive as such. Hospitals and health systems are better positioned to deliver high-quality, compassionate and personalized care when finance teams make decisions informed by qualitative and quantitative data that reflects the patient experience. Cost- cutting initiatives, capital investments or any other financial commitment made without a real-time understanding of patients is risky at best, reckless at worst. CFOs and care teams must rally around a mutual understanding of what a patient experience means in their institution. This shared vision will empower what may at first seem like an odd relationship. When CFOs work with clinical leaders to understand their needs and prioritize care team talent, performance and reliability within the financial framework, they will become true champions of the patient experience. n

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