Francis Tezanos joined HCA Houston Healthcare Tomball (Texas) as CFO in January, bringing a background of more than two decades with Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare, with the majority spent in IT before transitioning to finance.
Eight months into his new role at the 350-bed community hospital, Mr. Tezanos said his time in IT has given him a unique perspective in the CFO seat, particularly when it comes to connecting front-line care with financial decisions.
“Finance is no longer the job where you’re just looking at numbers,” he told Becker’s. “We’re in the business of taking care of our patients and our people. For me, it’s been more of a how do I connect the finance to the people, to the process, to the bedside and to the nurse that’s taking care of the patient.”
He said his IT perspective has helped him assess where the community most needs technology investments to improve efficiency.
The best way to do that, Mr. Tezanos said, is to look at things through the lens of the patient.
“What is the data saying, and where does the community need those investments to be invested in?” he said. “Do we need access points? Do we need better processes? Is there technology that can improve a process that may be a little longer today…and where is the growth in the community? Where do we need to invest to create an easier path for our patients to go from safe to healthy.”
As CFO of a hospital that is part of one of the nation’s largest health systems, Mr. Tezanos said the roles are more complementary than competing.
“The value of HCA Healthcare as a system is that we have shared resources, we have best practices — we have hospitals across the country that we can learn from — and then we can apply to our local market those best practices and that scalability that HCA has,” he said.
Asked about revenue cycle performance, Mr. Tezanos pointed to documentation accuracy and communication between care teams as top priorities.
He said industry challenges like increased costs and supplies and labor costs haven’t always made things easy, but the goal is to connect finance to the hospital’s patients to help streamline the process.
“We need to make sure that our nurses and our physicians are on the same documentation standard, that they speak the same languages to communicate what the care plan is, and in turn, the reimbursement is there from the insurance companies because the information is going to be accurate for them,” he said.
Looking ahead, Mr. Tezanos said he’s keeping a close eye on how technology will help shape hospital operations, ensuring the hospital is investing in the right areas to keep pace with the area’s growing population while also managing rising costs.
“How do we continue to provide service for the communities we serve? That’s what I look for in the next year,” he said. “And how to stay ahead of the increasing cost and make responsible decisions for our facilities so we can be sustainable in the future.”
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