Hospitals

Brittany Holloway-Brown, Photos: Adobe Stock

Healthcare financing is extremely complex…duh. But it seems like even the money experts are struggling, according to a report by consulting company Deloitte published earlier this month.

While almost three-quarters of healthcare CFOs (74%) said they’re expected to be “regularly or heavily” involved with enterprise decisions related to consumer affordability, access, and patient experience strategy, only 41% said they feel equipped to do so, the report found. This suggests

CFOs may need updated reporting structures, more collaboration with leadership across departments, and more access to data to measure program results, the authors wrote.

The survey, conducted this spring, included responses from 32 finance leaders from health systems with over $1 billion in revenue and 32 finance leaders from health plans that have 500,000+ members.

With financial pressures in healthcare escalating, the CFO role has expanded to work closer with other executives who address clinical, operational, and strategic issues, according to the report.

“A CFO has a greater span of considerations under their job title and what they do day to day than they have in the past,” Alicia Janisch, vice chair and US healthcare sector leader at Deloitte and lead author on the report, told us.

Learn more about how the CFO role is changing.—CM

      

Sponsored By PwC

PwC reports that health plans are projecting the highest medical cost trend in nearly two decades. (Oh, swell.)

Specifically: The commercial healthcare cost trend is expected to rise to 9% in 2027. PwC notes that the increase reflects several powerful forces reshaping the healthcare landscape, such as provider adoption of AI-enabled revenue optimization tools, growing provider reimbursement pressure, rising pharmacy spending, and more.

This article by PwC outlines this trend in detail alongside cost management strategies to help ease the strain and make for a healthier tomorrow.

Give it a read.

Hospitals

Francis Scialabba

Jason Elrod, VP and CISO at MultiCare Health System, a healthcare network in the Pacific Northwest covering 13 hospitals, describes his more than 30-person team as a “lean, mean, fighting security machine.”

But even lean and mean comes with challenges, especially when the job involves keeping critical healthcare machines on and attackers away, all while ensuring the cybersecurity team doesn’t become too tired and perspired.

“In most industries, downtime is measured primarily in dollars,” Elrod, also executive advisor at cybersecurity company Elisity, told IT Brew. “In healthcare, eventually you’re measuring it in clinical consequences, and so that changes how you make technology decisions, and it’s rough for IT professionals.” To that end, IT teams at MultiCare have to measure both cyber risk as well as impact on patients. “If…the air conditioning goes out in the summer or the heater goes out in the winter at the healthcare system: huge impact on patient care,” Elrod said. “We shift to the things that are the most impactful to the delivery of the mission, which is safe patient care.”

Keep reading about hospital IT challenges here.—BH

      

Direct care

Illustration: Shannon May, Photos: Unsplash

No one wants to think about grief, but it’s a common part of life.

The majority (61%) of working adults have experienced the death of a loved one while employed, according to a 2025 survey from the New York Life Foundation, and almost all (91%) consider coping with death as significant a life event as getting married or becoming a parent.

Grief can also lead to absenteeism and productivity loss, according to the American Psychiatric Association, costing companies $75 billion each year.

Loss and the subsequent grieving process is a universal experience, but many leaders are unaware of how they can help grieving employees, Patricia Bravo, a leadership development consultant and author of In the Room: When Grief Comes to Work, told us.

“Sometimes there’s a perspective gap around the actual emotional experience of [loss and grief],” Bravo said. “This is where I think grief literacy can really come in, in terms of helping professionals and organizations better understand what grief is.”

Learn more about grief literacy on HR Brew.—MC

      

vital signs

Francis Scialabba

Today’s top healthcare reads.

Stat: $96.7 million. That’s how much HHS recently gave in grants and cooperative agreements to programs with behavioral health and substance use disorder support across the country. (Fierce Healthcare)

Quote: “We also want to make sure that we can afford it the first time, afford it up front, so that we’re not in situations like other states who have had to contract or withdraw entirely their GLP-1 coverage.”—Seth Gold, Louisiana’s Medicaid director, on why the state has chosen not to join a Trump administration program meant to increase Medicaid recipients’ access to GLP-1s. (Politico)

Read: California may impose penalties on hospitals for exceeding spending growth targets. (Los Angeles Times)

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Mario Murreda

Healthcare Brew sat down with Ogilvy Health’s global CEO on how the agency is adapting its pharma marketing playbook as regulators and consumers both raise the bar on healthcare advertising.

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