Atlantic Health System CFO Leads ACA Discussion at CFO Studio Dinner

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 21, 2015

CONTACT:
Lorenz Capalad
(732) 868-0000 x118

Atlantic Health System CFO Leads Discussion on the Affordable Care Act
from a CFO Perspective at CFO Studio Dinner

SOMERSET, NJ – On January 20, 2015, Kevin Lenahan, CFO of the Atlantic Health System led a discussion entitled, “CFOs Inspiring Management and Employees to Benefit Under the ACA.”

Some of the tri-state area’s top financial executives attended the evening filled with good food, good drinks and great networking, courtesy of WithumSmith+Brown, a regional tax and advisory firm. Real Estate Strategies Corporation, a corporate real estate advisory, consulting M&A and transaction service firm hosted the CFO Studio Executive Dinner, which was held at Roots Steakhouse in Morristown, NJ.

Held just a couple of hours before the President’s State of the Union address, dinner conversation may have dipped a toe in the political waters once or twice, but largely remained focused on pragmatic approaches to dealing with the impact of the ACA on businesses of varying sizes.

Lenahan spoke about how the ACA has created urgency for healthcare systems to transform aspects of their business models in order to stay fiscally healthy. Other discussion participants spoke about the pros and cons of health exchanges as well as how they are wrestling with the financial challenges of having more employees qualify for the company insurance plans and dealing with the excise or “Cadillac” tax that many companies may face in 2018.

An article detailing this discussion will appear in an up coming issue of CFO Studio and on CFOstudio.com.

The next CFO Executive Dinner will be held on February 10th, 2015. The Dinner’s discussion leader will be Bill Flynn, Chief Financial Officer of Sharp Electronics Corporation and the topic will be “Managing Financial Performance and Global Business Culture in American Subsidiary.” To request an invitation, please contact Lorenz.Capalad@CFOstudio.com or phone: 732-868-0000 x118.

Since the beginning of 2014, CFO Studio has hosted several Executive Dinner Series meetings moderated by such distinguished guests as Claude Draillard, VP Finance of Dassault Falcon Jet, Caroline Dorsa, EVP and CFO of PSEG; Irv Rothman, President and CEO of Hewlett-Packard Financial Services; Jonathan Stearns, founder of Stearns Associated Partners; and Hugh C. Welsh, Esq., president and general counsel of DSM North America.

About CFO Studio
CFO Studio and CFO Studio Magazine deploy the best of new and traditional media to promote finance executives as business and strategy thought-leaders. Andrew Zezas is the host of CFO Studio and the Publisher of CFO Studio Magazine.

Visit www.CFOstudio.com to watch interviews with New Jersey area CFOs, with new releases every Thursday morning at 10:00 AM EST!

To read stories that have appeared in CFO Studio Magazine, or for subscriptions and advertising opportunities, visit www.CFOstudio.com.

Funding for CFO Studio and CFO Studio magazine is provided by Real Estate Strategies Corporation and select advertisers.

Real Estate Strategies Corporation provides corporate real estate advisory and transaction services to CFOs, General Counsels, Management, and corporate Boards in New Jersey and around North America.

www.CFOstudio.com
www.RealStrat.com
www.TheCFOsGuide.com

 

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Talking Strategy with Atlantic Health CFO

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By Julie Barker

Atlantic Health System’s CFO Kevin Lenahan says he spends most of his time “developing where Atlantic is going for the next five years.” Putting numbers on a strategic plan is only part of this. The face-to-face is crucially important: “Continuing to meet with other systems, with other partners.”

Tellingly, Atlantic Health System expects joint ventures, not mergers, to be the best way forward. In September 2013, Atlantic Health System and six other major health care systems in New Jersey and Pennsylvania jointly created AllSpire Health Partners, a consortium of 25 high-performing hospitals, to address saving money and improving quality by sharing best practices. Morristown Medical Center, for one, will be sharing its clinical practice knowledge in gynecology, cardiology, and geriatrics — areas where it ranks in the top 50 hospitals in the nation.

On the savings side, Lenahan hopes to see AllSpire make a commitment to, for instance, selecting a designated lab corporation as a single provider to which AllSpire members would send all their specialized pathology (called reference lab work), resulting in a good-sized discount. Lab costs can be very high; lowering them would serve the goal of making health care more affordable overall.

Says Lenahan, margin pressure caused by reduced reimbursement from Medicare is not going away. As it continues, “we’re going to have to find a way to reduce our costs. So if we can do it on the supply side, that is always the most ideal.”

The Next Wave in Health Care

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Atlantic Health System’s Kevin Lenahan gets creative as the day-to-day realities of the Affordable Care Act emerge

By Julie Barker

Managing finance in a changing environment is like riding a wave. “You don’t want to hit the wave too soon or too late and get washed out,” says Kevin Lenahan, Atlantic Health System’s vice president of finance and CFO. Amid the opportunities and potential perils facing a large hospital system today looms a large question: just when to take on additional risk in negotiated insurance contracts.

Since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (also known as the Affordable Care Act) was signed into law in 2009, hospitals have been on a journey from the old way of handling patient care and making money to a new way. As Lenahan navigates familiar waters of the fee-for-service model, he is also watching for the right moment to take on the monster waves of risk-bearing contracts. Meanwhile, he’s making deals to share knowledge and costs.

“Regardless of any changes that may happen to the law going forward, I think the model is going to change,” he says. “We need to be smarter about how we do things. Size and scale are going to matter, and that’s why we continue to grow.”

Including Morristown Medical Center, Overlook Medical Center, Newton Medical Center, Chilton Medical Center, and Goryeb Children’s Hospital, Atlantic Health System is one of the largest non-profit health care systems in New Jersey, and arguably the best run, having received the highest ratings by Moody’s (A1) and Standard & Poor’s (A+). It’s a testament to Lenahan’s and CEO Joseph A. Trunfio’s leadership that Atlantic Health System has stayed financially strong despite losing about $11 million a year due to Medicare Sequestration cuts. Lenahan, who has been with Atlantic Health System for 18 years and became CFO in 2010, oversaw the various negotiations, two of which led to mergers.

With a close eye on costs and opportunities and the will to eliminate such redundancies as multiple payroll departments, Atlantic Health does make money. Margins, says Lenahan, are 2 to 3 percent, which is “consistent with the major hospital systems in New Jersey.” Every dollar earned is reinvested in the organization. “We spend over $100 million a year in capital, a lot of it going for new technology and upgrading our facilities,” he says. As an example, Lenahan has just approved about $18 million for new electronic medical records (EMR) for physician practices.

Working Smarter

Bringing new physicians into the system is one of Lenahan’s focuses, as the physician practices department reports up through him. “It gives me the complete understanding of how the operations work. I’m not in a finance ivory tower two miles from the hospital. I’m meeting with physicians every day.” He negotiates their contracts, including benchmarks. He aligns physician and hospital incentives. And he keeps an eye on the results. “The value of care will trump the volume of care eventually,” he says.

Through mergers, Atlantic Health System set out to not only expand the organization, but make the care it provides more effective. Big enough now to purchase in bulk, the health care organization is looking to buy direct, cutting out the middleman in many situations. A year ago, it created an off-site central warehouse, which not only freed up space at the individual campuses, but enabled Atlantic Health System to expand bulk purchasing initiatives. “We probably saved about $2 million with that central warehouse,” says Lenahan.

As each acquisition closed — the most recent was the Chilton merger last January — Atlantic Health System’s leadership took steps to reengineer processes. Layoffs are not countenanced, so retooling is the answer.

On the patient-care side, similar scrutiny of processes is resulting in better financial outcomes and better quality of care. Atlantic Health System is set on reducing the overall cost of care for New Jersey’s Medicare population through its Accountable Care Organization (ACO), one of the largest in the country, says Lenahan, who is CFO of that business entity. If Atlantic Health System is successful in this, the government will share some of the savings with Atlantic Accountable Care Organization, which in turn will share the savings with the physicians, who are thus incented to make smart choices. The total spend for Medicare would be reduced by achieving a lower readmission rate, for example. Medicare is not a money-making proposition for the hospital system, paying about 95 to 96 cents on the dollar, and thus, there’s no incentive for providers to try to keep Medicare spending high.

Although it is in name and in fact a hospital system, Atlantic Health System does not need to keep patients in hospital beds to earn income. Atlantic Home Care is the arm that provides follow-up care and, not incidentally, helps keep patient insurance costs down. Atlantic Health System also owns a patient transportation company and a durable medical equipment company providing items such as respirators and oxygen.

In the new environment created by the Affordable Care Act, “your size gives you some ability [to make money], but you have to do something with that ability and I think we’ve been successful at that,” says Lenahan, who credits his mentors Kevin Shanley — his predecessor as CFO — and Trunfio. From the latter, he learned “to try to understand the big picture.”

“Patients have options and choices,” he says, but as the organization moves toward the implementation of electronic medical records, “we can more quickly and efficiently get the health care information to each of their doctors, and to the right specialists.” And after leaving the hospital, patients in Atlantic Health’s system can opt to use Atlantic Home Care, which is aligned with the hospital network’s physicians to ensure a quick recovery and minimize the necessity for readmissions. “So we’re controlling the care continuum.”

Looking to the Future

A three-year goal of Atlantic Health System, articulated in 2013, was to reach $2 billion in revenue, and according to Lenahan, the organization will likely achieve that goal in 2015, a year ahead of schedule. The purchase of Hackettstown Regional Medical Center, which, if given state approval, should be completed by the end of Q1 2015, achieves that objective in Atlantic Health System’s planned growth.

And what’s the next goal? Because Atlantic Health System has infrastructure in place, a large pool of high-quality physicians experienced with accountable care, and enjoyed good outcomes, Lenahan feels that the time is nearing to become aggressive and negotiate risk-bearing contracts. “My team and I are spending a lot of time analyzing the implications and helping our sites and our operations staff understand the impact of [that] change.”

A risk-bearing contract with a payor, whether Medicare Advantage or a commercial insurance company, would essentially state, “We’ll take upside-downside risk that we can manage the overall cost of care.” Atlantic Health System might have to discount some of its rates in such a negotiation, and “as you do that,” says Lenahan, “you’re going to need a certain amount of volume — new volume — to make up for it.”

Lenahan, who counts as one of his biggest pleasures visits to Long Beach Island with his family (two sons: one in college and one beginning his last year of high school), finds a natural metaphor in ocean waves. “Do you jump in with two feet, or do you ease your way in?” he asks.

Presently, he is anticipating the moment when all conditions are right for a smooth ride on a big wave, ahead of the curl and ahead of the competition.

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