Q&A Archive

View past answers to questions posed by CFO Forum members. 

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CFO Forum’s Ask the Expert Panel

Curtis Bernstein

Curtis Bernstein, CPA/ABV, ASA, CVA, is a managing director of the Valuation and Transactions Group of Altegra Health. Curtis’ practice focuses on financial consulting around healthcare transactions, including the transfer of assets or equity between organizations and the payment of compensation for the provision of services between parties with referral relationships.

A significant portion of Curtis’ work relates to compliance with the Stark and anti-kickback laws. Additionally, Curtis is active in the development and facilitation of physician compensation plans developed to incorporate pay for quality, capitated compensation, and other forms of incentive compensation set around recent updates in reimbursement.

Curtis can assist CFO Forum members with questions around:

• Physician practice valuation
• Physician compensation valuation
• Ancillary services valuation
• Fair market value and commercial reasonableness
• Hospital valuation
• ICD-10
  • Assessment and gap analysis
  • Education and training
  • Implementation
  • Staffing and budgeting
  • Systems remediation
   

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Pierre Bogacz

Pierre Bogacz is a managing director and co-founder of HFA Partners, LLC, an independent financial advisor to healthcare providers. He has more than 20 years of hospital capital financing, investment banking, bond underwriting, and management consulting experience. In his career, Pierre has worked with providers in acute care, ambulatory care, long-term care, behavioral care, physician groups, and diagnostic sectors. His core expertise includes:  

• Tax-exempt bond financings
• Bank debt
• Bank direct placements
• Credit enhancement
• Interest rate swaps
• Bond ratings
• Mergers and acquisitions
• Private equity
• Business valuation

He has significant experience in advising tax-exempt hospitals and health systems with debt financings of all types and is a frequent contributor to leading healthcare publications. HFA Partners is a registered municipal advisor.

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Paul T. Breslin

Paul T. Breslin is a Fellow in Health Innovation with Noblis, a not-for-profit science, technology, and strategy organization headquartered in Falls Church, Va. With his expertise in the fundamentals of business strategy, market assessments, and the financial realities of health care, Paul helps his clients develop resilient strategies and business plans to position their organizations for success. His clients include our nation’s federal healthcare systems as well as a wide range of healthcare organizations, including hospitals and physician practices.
Paul holds degrees in both industrial engineering and economics from Rutgers University and an MBA from Cornell University. He currently serves as an adjunct faculty member for the Boston University School of Public Health.

Paul can provide CFO Forum members with his perspectives from nearly 30 years of experience on the following topics:  

• Strategic planning
• Physician strategies/medical manpower planning
• Financial feasibility studies/business plans
• Financially sound master facility planning processes
• Capital investment planning and prioritization
• Free-standing emergency departments and satellite facilities

 Pose a question to Paul Breslin  

Rick Carter

Rick is best known as an expert in precise and rational physician economic solution modeling. His areas of specific interest and expertise include the following:

Rick Carter is chairman and senior consulting director of Equation Consulting, a 40-person healthcare consulting firm based in Salt Lake City specializing in the measurement, planning, and improvement of the physician economic enterprise. Rick has worked on 500+ projects with large and small group practices, academic faculty practice plans, employed multi-specialty groups, hospital-based physicians, and across medical and surgical specialties.

Prior to the 20 years in consulting, Rick served nine years in practice operations as CEO of a cardiology group, as administrator of an ophthalmology practice, and as owner and operator of a chain of urgent care centers and MSO.

Rick’s 34-year career in health care has focused on helping physicians and those employing physicians improve their practice economic outcomes in the following ways:

• Strategically through mergers and acquisitions, market-share expansion, ancillary development, and joint ventures
• Contractually through economically rationalized hospital relationships
• Operationally through improving productivity and coding, lowering overhead and debt, negotiating better rates, improving billing and collection results, projecting rational growth plans, designing incentivized compensation plans. and turning around practice losses

• Physician contracting, funding and affiliation agreements
• Employed physician economics
• Practice “big data,” analytics, benchmarking and reporting
• Practice economic forensics
• Micro economics of all specialties

Robert J. Ellertsen

Robert J. Ellertsen, FHFMA, has more than 35 years of experience in healthcare financial management. He is currently consulting full-time on accountable care organization (ACO) development for the Cambridge Health Alliance in Massachusetts.

Immediately prior to this project, Robert served as the interim vice president finance/CFO for the Cambridge Health Alliance Physicians Organization, an entity with 400 physicians. Robert is a former hospital CFO who has performed 17 interim financial management projects at hospitals and physician organizations, often as interim CFO.

Robert has an MBA from Boston University and is certified in all four of HFMA’s certification categories. His areas of expertise include the following:  

• ACO development
• Hiring and managing interim healthcare CFOs and other interim healthcare executives
• Presentations and reports to healthcare boards of directors and senior healthcare executives
• Management of healthcare finance department staff
• Financial ratio analysis
• Outsourcing of billing, self-pay collection, bad debt collection, and coding functions
• Management of the performance of companies providing outsourced services
• Financial management of hospital-based physician practices: hospitalist, emergency, pathology, radiology, anesthesiology
• Resource Based Relative Value System (RBRVS) and Current Procedure Code (CPT) financial and statistical analysis
• Using physician performance benchmarks from MGMA and AMGA
• Early warning signs of possible overcoding or undercoding of physician professional services
• Incentive compensation for primary care physicians
• TRICARE capital reimbursement

 Pose a question to Robert Ellertsen  

William “Marty” Martin

Marty Martin, PsyD, currently serves as a financial advisor, Aequus Wealth Management, and as an associate professor, College of Commerce, DePaul University. He is on the board of the Aurora Health System, serving on the board’s Executive Compensation Committee and chairing the Social Responsibility Committee, which focuses on community benefit.

Marty’s past roles have included associate dean, associate vice president of human resources and human resources information system, and senior executive for institutional diversity. He has served in leadership roles at organizations such as The Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Marty specializes in behavioral, ethical, and human resource-related topics of interest to finance leaders, including the following:  

• Executive compensation (behavioral perspective)
• Incentive compensation (behavioral perspective)
• Workplace financial education
• Workplace retirement education
• Retirement planning
• Socially responsible/sustainable investing
• Financial ethics
• Worksite wellness
• Financial incentives

 Pose a question to Marty Martin  

Keith A. Moore

Keith A. Moore, FHFMA, is CFO for HSHS Medical Group, Springfield, Ill., a network of primary care and specialty care physicians, nurses, and medical professionals. HSHS Medical Group is closely aligned with Hospital Sisters Health System in communities throughout central and southern Illinois and northeastern and northwestern Wisconsin.

Prior to joining the HSHS Medical Group, Keith served as a physician practice manager at Dixon-Hughes, PLLC. Other past positions include CFO for Duke University’s Affiliated Physicians, and CFO for Sharp Rees-Stealy Medical Group in San Diego.

Keith holds an MBA from University of San Diego and a master of public health degree in health services administration from the Graduate School of Public Health, San Diego State University.

Keith can provide CFO Forum members with a medical group perspective on the following topics:  

• Hospital/physician alignment
• Physician compensation plans
• Operational budgeting
• Managed care contracting
• Revenue cycle management

 Pose a question to Keith Moore  

Todd Nelson 

Todd Nelson has been the technical director for the senior financial executive and accounting areas of HFMA’s Healthcare Financial Practices Division since 2009. Prior to joining HFMA, he was the vice president and CFO of a rural regional medical center located in the Midwest for nearly 20 years, focusing on finance- and operations-related areas.

Prior to joining HFMA as an employee, Todd served in a volunteer role on HFMA’s Senior Financial Executive National Advisory Committee, as well as a chapter president and HFMA regional executive.

Nelson received his undergraduate degree in business administration, as well as his MBA, from the University of Iowa. He also serves on several national organizational Executive Advisory and Technical Advisory committees and has served on many state and local not-for-profit and private industry boards and development organizations as treasurer, vice president, and president.

Pose a question to Todd Nelson  

Craig Nesta 

Craig Nesta, FHFMA, FACHE, FACMPE, is a healthcare consultant and an adjunct assistant clinical professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management in the School of Public Health at Boston University. Prior to consulting, Craig led faculty group practice and hospital operations for departments within large academic teaching hospitals, including Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Children’s Hospital Boston.

Craig holds a law degree from Suffolk Law School, an MS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, an MBA from the University of Hartford, and a BS from Babson College.

His core areas of interest include:  

• Physician practice operations
• Service line planning and marketing
• Strategic planning and implementation
• Multisite satellite operations
• Revenue cycle management (professional)
• Recruitment, retention, and reward of management and staff
• Succession planning for management and staff
• Customer service management and improvement

Pose a question to Craig Nesta  

Michael J. Neuman   

Michael J. Neuman, CPA, FHFMA, is senior vice president of finance/CFO for Kennedy Krieger Children’s Hospital in Baltimore. Kennedy Krieger provides specialty healthcare services to children with special needs throughout the Maryland region. Additionally, research and special educational services are also large component of the organization, which is aligned with Johns Hopkins Medicine.

Prior to joining Kennedy Krieger, Michael served in the healthcare consulting practice of KPMG in Baltimore. Michael is a licensed CPA in Maryland and holds an MBA from the University of Baltimore.
Michael can provide CFO Forum members with a general perspective on the following topics:  

• Operational budgeting
• Capital planning and financing
• Revenue cycle management
• Managed care contracting
• Grants management
• Investments
• Risk management
• Productivity improvement
• Treasury and cash management
• Third-party cost reporting

 Pose a question to Michael Neuman  

Renee A. Rasmussen

Renee A. Rasmussen, CPA, MBA, FHFMA, is senior vice president of finance/CFO/compliance officer of Allen Health System in Waterloo, Iowa, which is an affiliate of Iowa Health System. Allen Health System includes a 204-bed acute care hospital and Allen College that enrolls 500 healthcare students. Renee started her healthcare career in the reimbursement area and advanced through her organization to CFO.

Renee received her undergraduate degree in accounting and computer information systems from University of Northern Iowa and her MBA from University of Iowa. She has served on the Board of Examiners for HFMA, and is also an expert for HFMA’s Payment & Reimbursement Forum.

Her core expertise includes:  

• Compliance
• Operational budgeting
• Revenue cycle
• Medicare cost report reimbursement issues

Pose a question to Renee Rasmussen  

Rosemary Rotty

Rosemary Rotty, MHA, FHFMA, is director of service line, finance at UMass Memorial Healthcare (UMMHC) where she has been employed since 1997. UMMHC is a $2 billion healthcare system and the clinical partner of University of Massachusetts Medical School.

At UMMHC, Rosemary functions as the lead business partner to various clinical service lines. She is responsible for the coordination of many financial functions related to service line performance reporting and acts as the primary liaison between the clinical service lines and the department of finance. Rosemary also functions as the financial and operational subject matter expert for the service lines regarding all management reports provided to service line leaders and functional area managers.

Rosemary’s knowledge base covers:  

• Strategic planning and capital planning
• Service line analytics
• Benchmarking and metrics

Rosemary has an MHA degree from Clark University and is a fellow of HFMA. Prior to UMMHC, Rose worked at Tufts Health Plan in the policy department and as a dental hygienist in private practice.

Rosemary is a member of the Enterprise Performance Management Committee for HFMA’s Massachusetts-Rhode Island Chapter and on HFMA’s Massachusetts-Rhode Island Board of Directors.

Pose a question to Rosemary Rotty  

Alan E. Schabes

Alan E. Schabes, Esq., is a partner, Benesch Friedlander, Cleveland, Ohio. He focuses his practice on healthcare law, including the representation of healthcare private equity and venture capital investment firms, long-term care and residential care facilities, integrated delivery systems, physician groups, ancillary service providers, and healthcare private equity and venture capital investment firms.

Alan’s specific areas of legal expertise include the following:

• Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement matters
• Fraud and abuse
• Asset and stock acquisitions
• Joint venture formation

Alan is also an expert on HFMA’s Legal & Regulatory Forum. He has spoken nationally on a variety of healthcare topics to groups, including the American Health Lawyers Association, the American College of Health Care Administrators, the American Association of Homes for the Aging, and the Ohio Health Care Association. He has published numerous health care-related articles in national publications.

Pose a question to Alan Schabes  

Christoph Stauder

Christoph Stauder, CPA, FHFMA, is president, Stauder Consulting LLC, a revenue cycle consulting firm in Beaverton, Oregon that specializes in improving revenue cycle operations for hospitals and physician groups. Christoph began his career as an auditor and business consultant with Arthur Andersen in 1985.

Christoph holds a BA in religion from Gettysburg College (Phi Beta Kappa) and an MA in religious studies from The University of Chicago.

He is past president of HFMA’s Oregon Chapter, and has taught certification coaching courses for his chapter for many years. He wrote the first edition of HFMA’s PFS Study Guide in 1996 and is the author of HFMA’s new Certification Candidate Practicum, an all-day seminar offered nationally by HFMA.

Christoph can assist CFO Forum members with questions on the following topics:  

• All aspects of revenue cycle management for hospitals and physician groups
• Hospital and physician group price setting
• Clinical documentation improvement
• Budgeting
• ROI analysis

Pose a question to Christoph Stauder  

David A. Williams

David A. Williams, CPA, FHFMA, is a partner and leader of healthcare reimbursement and advisory services, HORNE, LLP. He is also chairman of the company’s technology committee and a member of the firm’s IT project review committee.

With more than 25 years of experience, David’s practice is concentrated in the healthcare industry providing assurance, reimbursement, and advisory services for a wide range of organizations, including hospitals, outpatient centers, home health care agencies, skilled nursing facilities, assisted living centers, rural health clinics, and mental rehabilitation centers.

David’s specific areas of expertise include the following:

• Reimbursement and policy issues related to Medicare and Medicaid
• Strategic planning
• Visioning with physicians
• Community health needs assessment
• Quality and outcome efficiency (LEAN)
• Due diligence
• Debt capacity
• M&A structure

David earned a bachelor of business administration degree from the University of Southern Mississippi. He is an HFMA fellow, and serves on the National Board of Examiners. David is also an expert on HFMA’s Payment & Reimbursement Forum.

Pose a question to David Williams  

Jay G. Zeinfeld

Jay Zeinfeld currently serves as president, The Optimus Group. Jay is one of the country’s foremost experts in equipment finance and leasing from the customer’s perspective. In Jay’s 22 years of experience, he has reviewed more than 3,000 lease contracts and has represented many Fortune 2000 companies in the healthcare, legal, engineering, construction, distribution, and manufacturing industries.

Jay’s unique understanding of the complexities and financial ramifications of lease transactions has resulted in The Optimus Group’s clients saving tens of millions of dollars.

Jay can answer Forum members’ questions about equipment finance and leasing, including queries related to the following:  

• Lease versus buy decisions
• How to calculate the true interest rate in a lease
• Which lease structure is best for our set of circumstances
• How to compare cost per procedure offerings to a lease to a loan
• Lease documentation questions
• General equipment leasing questions
• General equipment leasing problems

 Pose a question to Jay Zeinfeld  

Other Experts Are Available

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