Shaken but stirred: Kodiak Summit Elevate recap

Attendees of Kodiak's Summit Elevate may have been shaken by what they heard, but they were stirred to action by speaker after speaker during the multi-day event. 

The invitation-only event for healthcare CFOs and senior-level leadership was held April 23-25 at the Grand Hyatt Tampa Bay in Tampa, Florida. 

Unlike traditional Kodiak Healthcare Summits, Summit Elevate essentially featured nine consecutive all-attendee sessions over one-and-a-half days with no concurrent breakout sessions, separate workshops, or roundtable discussions. It was an immersive, end-to-end experience for attending CFOs and senior-level leaders.  

It also was clear from the opening keynote address that 2025 and the remaining eight months of the year will not be like any other—fiscal or otherwise—experienced by anyone attendance. 

Thomas Koulopoulos, Co-Founder and CEO of the Delphi Group, a Boston-based think tank and advisory firm, gave the opening keynote and attendees a preview of healthcare market trends that they’ll have to deal with in the near future. Among them: 

• Exponential growth in personal devices and apps that will give consumers what he called a “shadow healthcare system” to circumvent the delivery friction plaguing the current system. 
• Agentic artificial intelligence technology that can act dependently and make decisions itself. 
• Recursive AI technology that can teach itself to get better and smarter without human intervention and that is indistinguishable from human consciousness. 

Editor’s note: For Koulopoulos’ thoughts on how recursive AI will affect the daily work lives of healthcare CFOs, click here.

Vince Galloro, veteran healthcare public relations and communications specialist, followed Koulopoulos, moderating a panel of three visibly exasperated healthcare policy experts. They answered Galloro’s questions about the seemingly endless and contradictory health policy directives coming from the Trump White House. 

Panelist Andrew Sudimack, a health economist, said healthcare program cost cutting under Trump and his Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency isn’t driven by any health policy or ideology per se but, rather, the search to find revenue to pay for tax cuts and reduce the federal deficit. 

Kim Streit, Senior Vice President at the Florida Hospital Association, expressed her concern that DOGE’s search will neuter the Affordable Care Act and the people who depend on it for health insurance benefits and providers who depend on it for revenue. She said there are more people enrolled in ACA plans in Florida than in commercial health plans. 

Topping Don May’s list of concerns is the potential $880 billion in federal spending cuts to the Medicaid program that would cripple hospitals and health systems that depend on Medicaid for revenue. May is the Executive Vice President, Payment and Healthcare Delivery Policy, at the Federation of American Hospitals, the trade group representing tax-paying hospitals and health systems.  

Whether it’s good news or bad, effectively communicating a hospital or health system’s financial position to its governing board is critical, especially during unprecedented times. That was the message from the next session on strategic stewardship led by Kodiak Vice President of Finance and Reimbursement Ryan Herr and Kodiak board member Mike Coggin, the now-retired former CFO of LifePoint Health. They shared detailed lists of do’s and don’ts and tips and tricks for CFOs and other finance leaders who regularly report to their boards. 

Their overarching message? View the board as an ally, not an enemy. 

Boards, CFOs, and senior leadership do have a common enemy, though, and that’s bad actors who pose a 24/7 escalating cybersecurity threat to the privacy and security of providers’ clinical and business data and information. That was the message from Kodiak’s Director of IT and Cybersecurity John Norenberg, who gave a lunchtime briefing on common cybersecurity threats facing healthcare providers. Norenberg’s presentation was based on an analysis of the cyber defenses of a representative sample of a dozen hospitals and health systems. 

Among the six most common holes in those defenses were: 

• All had unsecured sensitive information everywhere. 
• All had spotty patch management processes. 
• All had technical vulnerabilities in their networks. 

Editor’s note: What are the other three and how can you address all six? Read “Learn how your hospital can outsmart cybercriminals.” 

If Norenberg’s talk gave Summit Elevate attendees heartburn, the next session, moderated by Ben Isgur, Vice President of Thought Leadership at Fidelity Investments, was the antacid. He led a panel discussion featuring not-for-profit hospital and health system market experts from three credit rating agencies: 

• Suzie Desai from S&P Global Ratings 
• Kevin Holloran from Fitch Ratings 
• Daniel Steingart from Moody’s 

Editor’s note: Read the three original outlooks for 2025 from the three credit agencies in “Stable. For now.” 

The consensus of the panel was, yes, not-for-profit hospitals and health systems are experiencing legacy threats to cash flow from fixed or insufficient payment rates, high labor costs, cybersecurity threats, and rising chronic disease rates and new threats from potential Medicaid cuts, reductions in medical research funding, and restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services. But not-for-profit providers have a few aces to play, said Desai, Holloran, and Steingart. Among them: 

• They will always have a “book of business” because people will continue to need acute care and outpatient services despite the Make America Healthy Again movement. 
• They are awash in data that can help them make data-driven and informed clinical, financial, and operational decisions. 
• They are increasingly deploying AI-powered technologies to improve efficiency and reduce costs. 
• They have strong management teams that are smart, resilient, and battle tested. 
• They have strong financial reserves. 
• They do not rely on investment income for their business models to work. 

Before heading to the beach for dinner and a networking event, Summit Elevate attendees heard from Kodiak Vice President of Revenue Cycle Eric Boggs, who shared the past state, current state, and future state of Kodiak Revenue Cycle Analytics, RCA Next, and the Kodiak Platform. The bottom line? Kodiak RCA users now represent more than $225 billion in open accounts receivable and more than $1.6 trillion in annual gross revenue. And those figures are growing by the day.  

Possibly with sand in their hotel rooms if not in their shoes, Summit Elevate attendees picked it up bright and early the next morning at a candid and enlightening session on private equity ownership of physician practices. Kodiak Senior Vice President of Finance and Reimbursement Eric Busch led the session, which featured Fred Simmons, the now-retired former CEO of Clearwater Cardiovascular Consultants, a 22-physician cardiology specialty practice with about 180 employees. A PE firm bought the practice in October 2023.  

While Simmons detailed the blow-by-blow that culminated in the deal, Busch offered a checklist of what doctors and PE firms each get out of such a deal.  

No Kodiak Healthcare Summit event—Elevate or traditional—would be complete without a presentation on revenue cycle KPIs. Presented by Kodiak Vice President of Revenue Cycle Intelligence Matt Szaflarski and Vice President of Revenue Cycle Megan Beasley, this session walked Elevate attendees through what revenue cycle insights are possible from Kodiak through RCA, now used by 2,100 hospitals and 300,000 physicians. There literally is nothing hospitals, health systems, and medical practices can’t know about their revenue cycle performance by tapping into Payor Market Intelligence and the broader Revenue Cycle Intelligence suite offered by Kodiak. 

The final session of Summit Elevate was a “fireside chat” led by Kodiak Senior Vice President of Risk and Compliance Dan Yunker. There was no actual fire, but there were plenty of fiery responses from attendees to Yunker, who synthesized comments from all the previous sessions into thoughtful questions to attendees.  

It was clear from the final Summit Elevate session that what’s happening in healthcare generally, what’s happening in attendees’ own markets, and what’s happening in Washington has shaken healthcare CFOs and senior leadership. But they were stirred to action by their peers and session presenters at this event.