Interview with a CFO: What does a hospital CFO worry about?

No surprise: CFOs think about cash flow

If you’re a marketing or sales professional in health care B2B, you are likely to think a lot about chief financial officers (CFOs). I know I do. Rather than just thinking about them, I decided to interview one.

Shortly before I started Lumeno Marketing—my health care marketing and communications agency—I sat down with a friend of mine who also happens to be a hospital CFO. My objective was to try to understand how a CFO makes purchasing decisions. Over the next few posts, I’ll summarize what he told me and then share some thoughts about what I learned. This post will discuss the issues my CFO friend and others like him worry about.

But first, a little background. I didn’t get my friend’s permission to use his name, so I won’t. He works for a physician-owned facility that competes with a much larger hospital nearby. This isn’t his first hospital gig. He had been the CFO of another hospital before, and, as far as I know, he has about 15 years of c-level experience under his belt.

The first question I asked him was, “What’s the first thing you think about when you sit down at your desk?” His answer was thorough: not only did he tell me his first concern, he also shared the major concerns that he manages every day.

His first concern: “What’s our cash position?” He gets a daily report of the previous day’s cash status so he can know how he can pay the hospital’s bills.

His first concern leads to his second concern: “What’s our patient volume?” The cost of staffing a bed isn’t insignificant, so my friend needs to know if his staffed beds are being put to good use.

His third concern is something about which we in the health care IT and B2B business can help him: “How can I reduce expenses?” According to my friend, his biggest expenses are supplies and labor.

Are there any other concerns that a hospital CFO might need to address on a daily basis?

Next post: How does a CFO earn his keep?

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kukywa/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Tagged as: CFO, Chief financial officer, Health care B2B, Health care IT, Hospitals, Interview, Persuasion