CT: Is it good to show a minimal amount of overhead? What message are you trying to convey?
DE: Keeping our overhead at a minimum is critical to our success, as keeping fees low is a necessary component for us to bring healthcare to the underserved and rural communities that do not have substantial funding to support these initiatives on their own. By keeping these costs low we are able to show that implementing telehealth solutions throughout the state is not necessarily a costly endeavor.
CT: Is overhead a meaningful measure of your non-profits success? If not, what is?
DE: Overhead is not as meaningful a measure for our success as is the success of our outreach efforts and the number of patients that are able to access critical healthcare due to CTN’s efforts. These people would normally not be able to receive those services.
CT: Who cares most about transparency?
DE: CTN’s board is comprised of highly capable and successful healthcare industry experts that are tasked with ensuring that CTN is focused on delivering their mission. Providing transparency to the board about our challenges, costs, and successes enables us to more fully utilize their expertise to address potential issues and opportunities and to maximize our ability to achieve our mission.
CT: What is the biggest advantage of transparency and what is the risk?
DE: The biggest advantage of transparency is to more fully engage industry players that are teamed with us to accomplish our mission. The more clarity that we provide to these individuals and entities, the more able we are to have them step forward to provide solutions and to assist us to close in on opportunities. The risk of this transparency is the potential for people who are now engaged to “course correct” CTN in a direction more suited to their own vision of what accomplishing our mission means.
CT: What aspect of your financials do your stakeholders focus on? What aspect should they focus on?
DE: One of the primary areas our stakeholders evaluate is our cash flow and runway. The runway should be long enough to ensure existing critical
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team members will not be in jeopardy of being laid off in the foreseeable future but not so much that opportunities to hire more staff or incur expenses that allow us to take great strides towards our mission are forsaken.
CT: Are you influenced by society in creating “their” financial picture or “yours”?
DE: We are focused on creating a financial picture for ourselves that ensures that we are able to grow at a sustainable rate and that all the costs that are incurred are chosen so that they maximize our progress towards our mission.
CT: What is the biggest challenge the sector faces to present true transparency?
DE: Currently, the healthcare sector is undergoing a major shift in how costs can be incurred and passed on to the consumer. Payers such as Blue Shield and Medicare are slow to adapt billing systems to support the new ways in which healthcare is being provided, which dramatically impacts patient health and safety. As these rules change and the ways they can be reported is relaxed, transparency on these costs will remain a huge challenge for healthcare providers as well as patients.
CT: What additional things would you like to see to increase transparency?
DE: Transparency would help facilitate better business and health decisions if anticipated billing amounts were accessible to patients and consumers prior to decisions being made and bills received matched what was communicated beforehand. We are living in a time when a patient needing services has no idea how much a service will cost at his healthcare location or how much it would cost elsewhere. If that patient is able to find out, then they are often surprised when the bill that arrives differs substantially from what was anticipated.
CHANGING
HEALTHCARE,
CHANGING
LIVES