Tuesday, July 8, 2025

< + > A Roadmap for Rural Healthcare Resilience at HFMA

At the big national conferences, you often don’t get great discussions about rural health.  This wasn’t the case at HFMA 2025 where they had a great session hosted by Jason B. Griffin from Nordic Global on building rural health resilience.  The panel discussion included Laura Kreofsky, MHA, MBA, PMP, CDH-E, Director of Rural Health at Microsoft Philanthropies, Pam Austin, MBA, PMP, CPHIMS, CIO at Ballad Health, and Shana Tate, Chief Revenue Officer at Ballad Health.

In this wide ranging discussion, these expert panelists shared a number of important perspectives that make rural health unique.  They also shared some unique details about Microsoft, Nordic Global, and CHIME’s efforts to bring rural health leaders together to address some of their challenges including things like bandwidth.

Plus, it was particularly interesting to hear leaders from Ballad Health because they have to provide care in the urban hospital environment along with their rural health facilities.  This means they often miss out on rural health pricing/grants/benefits.  They also shared details for how their resiliency was tested when one of their hospitals was destroyed in a massive flood.

I shared many of the key insights from the session on social media which you can find below with some additional commentary.

It was great to see HFMA wasn’t leaving rural health behind at their conference.  Given the number of people in attendance at this session, it was a good choice to talk about the unique needs of rural health.

One of the trademarks of this panel was the frank discussion of the realities of healthcare today.  Tate highlighted really well how the financials for an urban hospital are so different than a rural hospital.  When you have both, one is often helping the other.  However, it’s important that you look at the unique needs of each organization including from a financial perspective.

I think we’ve all been to conference sessions that talk about how a disaster event impacts a healthcare organization.  These are common in IT where IT resiliency and business continuity are top of my mind for so many IT leaders.  However, it was fascinating to hear the details for how Ballad Health reacted from a revenue cycle perspective.  The two biggest items seemed to be that you can’t bill for care from a bed that doesn’t exist.  And second, you get paid a lot less for an urgent care visit than you would have for an ED visit.

Kudos to Austin for pointing this out in the conversation.  I’ve seen so many CIOs try and lead their business continuity and disaster recovery efforts.  No doubt it has to be a collaborative effort between operations and IT.  However, at the end of the day, operations often knows their processes and needs much better than IT and so they should lead.  IT can support.

I’ve heard and written about the damages related to a cybersecurity incidents many times.  Fines are expensive.  Recovery is expensive.  Damage to reputation is expensive.  And so much more.  However, I don’t know why it hit me differently when Kreofsky said that a healthcare cybersecurity incident can be as much as 25% of a healthcare organization’s operating budget.  Talk about a revenue impact.  That puts in perspective why good security planning is so important.

Extending the cybersecurity discussion, Austin shared how after COVID their IT teams went home and never came back.  The ability to be remote is the only way they’ve been able to fill some of their IT positions.  Otherwise, they’re stuck with unfilled positions or unqualified people in positions that have to be trained up.

What a great example of collaboration.  Congrats to Nordic Global, Microsoft, and CHIME for coming together to address some of the pressing needs of rural health organizations.  The lack of bandwidth at many rural health organizations was mentioned as a problem many times.  Think about how we’re moving to the cloud with so many applications and yet many of these locations don’t have great bandwidth.  That’s a problem.

With that said, the group came together and worked with Starlink to provide their high speed satellite internet to these rural health environments.  Plus, they got them to offer it at an extremely discounted rate.  I also loved that Microsoft was working on ways to offer rural health nonprofit pricing to organizations that have a mixed environment.

No RCM, no mission.  Is that the new mantra HFMA should consider?  Tate is right that if there’s not good revenue flowing in, then a healthcare organization won’t surive.  Plus, I love that revenue and IT leaders are partners together to try and make the most of what’s possible.

This idea is one that stuck with me the most after the session.  One that many IT leaders need to remember.  IT is great. ROI is better.  Sometimes IT facilitates ROI, but if it doesn’t then why are we doing it?

One of the questions at the end of the session was about the choice to offshore or nearshore their RCM.  Fascinating to hear that Ballad Health has already outsourced it, so they rely on their outsourced vendor to make that decision.  However, they’re involved with their vendor to make sure they understand the approach they’re taking.

This session was particularly interesting for me being Healthcare IT Today.  There was a lot of IT discussion in it along with an overtone of revenue that made it unique and interesting.  I’m excited to see what comes of this rural health group that’s coming together with Nordic Global, Microsoft, and CHIME.  I’m sure we’ll hear more about it in the future.

Nordic Global is a proud sponsor of Healthcare Scene.



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