3 trends Moffitt Cancer Center’s CFO is following

Joanna Weiss, executive vice president and CFO of Tampa, Fla.-based Moffitt Cancer Center, has spent nearly two decades serving in various finance-related roles at the National Cancer Institute-designated center. 

She began her career at Moffitt as director of internal audit, working her way up to vice president of revenue cycle management and then to senior vice president of finance, prior to her current role. Ms. Weiss’ experience in revenue cycle and finance has shaped her leadership approach at the facility, which serves more than 30,000 new patients and 600,000 encounters each year.

During a Becker’s CFO and Revenue Cycle Podcast episode, Ms. Weiss shared her perspective on today’s top healthcare trends, from post-pandemic financial stabilization and capital constraints to the evolving role of AI in operational efficiency.

Editor’s note: Responses have been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Question: What are the top 3 trends you’re following in healthcare today?

Joanna Weiss: I would say financial stabilization. We came out of the pandemic, and it took us several years to sort of recover from that experience. We’ve seen improving margins subsequent to the pandemic, and I would say we’re just now sort of taking a deep breath. As the winds are always changing in healthcare, just that stabilization and that continuation of financial stewardship in such a slim margin industry is always top of mind. Trying to understand how you balance both growth and growing out of those compressed margins, but also finding ways that you can continue to increase those margins in ways that are both good for the patient and good for our faculty.

[The] buzzword that we all know is artificial intelligence, and really trying to understand where we have opportunities. We have a tremendous amount of automation in our current revenue cycle, and it’s in excess of the equivalent of 400 workers. We utilize automation quite a bit, but taking that to the next level, how can we use agentic AI? How can we use AI for other things that [will] make our cost to collect lower? It’s going to decrease our overall cost of providing the service to our patients and to our organization. So that’s the second item. 

I would say the third item is really a deviation from the first. How do we grow in an environment where everyone is so capital constrained because of the margins that we live with? [We need to]  figure out ways to think strategically, scenario plan and be prepared for things such as changing reimbursement, federal regulations or state regulations, getting our operational teams ready for what we would do in case something really catastrophic [occurs].

Q: With all of the technology out there, from a financial perspective, how do you go about choosing the best option?

JW: Under the leadership of our vice president of revenue cycle at Moffitt, she has done a really good job of identifying where our largest financial opportunities are. In oncology care, denials are a big component of that. Our intent is to ensure that we receive all the reimbursement that we are compliantly and appropriately entitled to. That was the first area that we’ve really explored. We’ve just recently implemented a solution that we are extremely excited about that has already started to yield very nice returns for us.

The second is where we have substantial [full-time equivalent] reliance and, not just reliance, but it’s hard to recruit experienced team members. That’s in our coding space. Coding is, particularly in oncology and especially in inpatient oncology, where you have cell and gene therapy. Inpatient coders are very hard to come by. Looking for ways that we can increase their ability to code efficiently, compliantly and appropriately, is the second area that we’re really exploring. We haven’t implemented the solution yet, but we’ve identified it and are in the process. We’re really excited about both of those.