Budgeting

One of the most daunting challenges any newly appointed healthcare supply chain leader will face is establishing direction. The best practices listed below, gathered from my 16 years of experience in supply chain, will get you moving in the right direction.

South Nassau Communities Hospital CFO Mark Bogen spoke with Healthcare Finance News about risk, controlling costs and revenue challenges for his Oceanside, N.Y.-based organization.

Facing threats to net revenue, most healthcare organizations have embarked on massive cost reduction initiatives. Unfortunately, the first tactic for many of these initiatives continues to be a "tried and true" approach which is often ineffective -- operational benchmarking.

When physicians are uninvolved in how expenses are handled in the larger health system environment, and it does not affect their income, behavior changes and apathy for the operational overhead ensues. Institutions leave themselves open to problems when a physician has no incentive to keep costs low.

Financial models involve a whole series of assumptions about such elements as volume, payer mix and salaries. While a health system may have historical data to work from, putting together projections for a new line of business is more difficult.

Health costs will accelerate next year, but changes in how people buy care will help keep them from attaining the speed of several years ago, PricewaterhouseCoopers says in a new report.

Driven by an aging population and an expanding pool of younger patients, bone-graft substitutes are a $2.5 billion market, which should continue to rise as a result of minimally invasive procedures.

The breakthrough hepatitits C drug Sovaldi has brought the high price of specialty pharma to recent public attention. But less examined are proactive approaches that could be used to curb the growth trend without depriving patients of needed therapies.

Disasters, natural and man-made, threaten more than hospital property. With many healthcare information technology systems integrated and focused on patient care, the threat of an IT or communications shutdown can be both dangerous to patients and costly to the health system.

While majorities of healthcare providers see value-based payment models becoming the reimbursement status quo in coming years, fewer than one-in-three say the reward is worth the risk.