David Johnson: The perils and possibilities of healthcare apps
In March of 2022, I coauthored a commentary titled “Healthcare’s final frontier: Engaging customers.” It contained this tongue-in-cheek Star Trek reference: “[H]ealthcare is now boldly going where most industries have gone before — into full-fledged consumer engagement.” Wanting full-fledged consumer engagement and making it happen are not synonymous. In the best of healthcare times, providers…
Jill Geisler: 6 things good leaders don’t do when delivering bad news
Don’t you just love those days when it feels great to be a manager? That’s when business is humming, quality is high, and your team is happy. As a leader, you have the delightful job of sharing success stories with everyone involved. Life is good. And then there are the far less pleasant days. In…
Heffernan and Stoll honored with 2023 Morgan Awards
HFMA’s highest individual award — the Frederick C. Morgan Award for Individual Achievement — is awarded annually to a member who has made outstanding contributions to the Association over the course of a career. For only the third time since the award was first presented in 1959, two members received the special honor when the…
8 Chapters receive 2023 HFMA Success Awards
Each year, leaders of HFMA’s chapters and regions gather at the Leadership Training Conference to plan for the year ahead and to acquire the skills and resources needed to go back home and make it happen. This year’s event took place April 16-18 in San Antonio, Texas. One of the highlights was the volunteer recognition…
Dennis Dahlen: It’s time to be biased toward action
We’re in an extraordinary period of discovery and innovation in healthcare, from a breakthrough treatment that delays the onset of Type 1 diabetes to the potential to use advanced artificial intelligence (AI) to help patients manage their health. But embracing the promise of innovation within our organizations depends on our ability to lead teams to…
Ken Perez: How homelessness and healthcare are inextricably linked
Homelessness is a worsening problem for the United States, and in multiple ways, it is a healthcare issue. Many of our nation’s failed efforts to solve this problem, outlined below, do not fully acknowledge this reality. But a promising new not-for-profit initiative, Built for Zero, may provide a truly viable solution using a data-driven approach…
Jill Geisler: The best healthcare finance leaders are also great coaches
When we become managers, we start with assumptions about our role. We may believe that, as the person in charge, we need to a be a decision-maker, problem-solver, idea person and quality controller. That’s a good list. But it’s incomplete. Working with managers for many years, I’ve learned that the best leaders also aspire to…
Dave Johnson: Diagnostic determinism — How precision diagnostics will reinvent medicine
In the movie “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home,” the spaceship Enterprise travels back in time to San Francisco in the mid-1980s. Its mission is to transport humpback whales into the 23rd century to redirect a space probe heading to destroy earth. It’s a complicated story. While trying to escape police custody, crewmember Pavel Chekov…
HFMA, it’s time for action!
We’ve all been in situations where the time was right, where conditions were optimal or good enough to suggest the best opportunity for action. Growing up on a dairy farm, I learned early that nature exerted a stronger hand on our schedules and work than anything humans could muster. Weather was, of course, a constant…
Marcus Whitney: Banking struggles are limiting healthcare innovation
T here has not been much ado in the healthcare world about the failure of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), but maybe there should be. Once considered the go-to bank for startups, SVB was the target of a bank run March 9 driven by news of their held-to- maturity bonds being underwater, and it was taken over by…