The CFO's Role in Accelerating Healthcare Innovation

Kevin Brennan is a healthcare change agent. He was instrumental in driving innovation at Geisinger during his 23 year role as CFO, where he helped the organization embrace healthcare IT to capture, collect, and use data in novel and impactful ways. Those innovations helped evolve the organization into a high-performance national leader in value-based care delivery, providing high-quality care and superior patient experiences for millions of people at costs well below the national average.

On today's show, Dr. David Nace and Kevin Brennan discuss the innovation lessons Mr. Brennen learned over his 35 year career in healthcare finance; unpack his advice for how payers and providers can accelerate innovation to support value-based care; explore the role of IT innovation in a health system; and explain how finance officers can be a catalyst for change that puts the patient back at the center of healthcare.

Today's panel features David Nace, MD, chief medical officer at Innovaccer; and Kevin Brennan, CPA, FHFMA, a principal at SunStone Consulting. Previously, Mr. Brennan was the CFO of Geisinger Health System for 23 years, where he managed annual net revenues of nearly $7 billion; and is a former national chair of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA). Mr. Brennan is also a member of Innovaccer's strategic advisory board.

They dig into:

• The role of innovation in a health system
• The role of a finance officer in helping to facilitate innovation
• The financial assets and decisions required to help a healthcare enterprise move into risk
• How to use technology to enable the kind of collaboration that can bring costs down
• Overcoming cultural resistance in IT and clinical operations to embrace new approaches to care and reimbursement
• Build another data center or go to the cloud?