Summary:

Fran Pennell is a Principle in CCG with over 35 years of experience in health care operational and financial performance improvement.  Fran has worked as a Health Care Consultant for most of her career including 21 years as Partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) in their Health Care consulting practice. Her focus has been on operations improvement, financial turnarounds, strategic planning and organizational restructuring for clients including large and small hospitals, large academic medical centers and practice plans, smaller physician practices, university medical schools and manages care companies.   As part of her projects, Fran supported numerous information system implementations with redesign of core clinical and business processes to support new technology and medical equipment.  Fran has also worked closely with financial investment groups to advice on industry issues to support new health care investments.  Over the years, Fran has assembled and directed many professional teams to achieve successful outcomes in resolving difficult and complex operational, financial and strategic issues.  Fran has had extensive interaction with boards of directors and senior medical personnel to guide decisions around health care operations and delivery.  Fran has also provided direct senior management leadership directing day to day operations of hospitals.  Fran’s deep health care experience and industry expertise has helped her clients achieve successful outcomes with improved cost structures, efficient work processes and financial stability.

Experience:

• Implemented small and large scale operational and financial improvement projects for hospital systems, academic medical centers and Schools of Medicine and Dentistry.  Utilized Six Sigma and Lean techniques and benchmarking analyses to achieve results.   Some of the most common areas for redesign and process improvement included:
  • Patient though put – including all ED workflows and operations, bed management, patient admissions.
  • Perioperative Services – including pre-op scheduling and processes, OR scheduling, staff assignment and scheduling, room utilization, central sterile support and processes, post surgical activities including inpatient admissions.
  • Physician practices – including physician scheduling, room scheduling and utilization, staffing and space optimization, productivity management, and patient flow from scheduling to post visit care.
  • All ancillary services – including internal and external process flows from  test request to results reporting
  • Nursing – including nurse staffing  templates and management, scheduling, delivery models and  organization
  • Case Management – including model development, productivity management, work flow, bed utilization and monitoring,  patient entry to post visit care
  • Ambulatory care areas – including patient flow, scheduling, space utilization, staff and physician productivity, teaching model development.
  • Administrative areas – including overall organization restructuring, productivity monitoring ,  management report development,  training development and delivery,  goal setting and performance evaluations and financial management.
• Led and supported financial turnaround projects for hospital and health systems (with operating deficit ranges of $10 million- $90 million) who were seeking to achieve financial solvency and stability.  Projects involved all aspects of hospital operations and required implementing a wide range of changes to achieve successful financial outcomes.
• Led numerous strategic planning activities with boards of directors and senior leadership with a focus on clinical program development, operational and organization configuration and change management.
• Redesigned major clinical and business processes to support new IT implementations supporting order entry, results reporting, bed management, nurse call systems, logistics and patient transportation, advanced clinical functions and data management.  Designed operational reports and executive dashboards to support management oversight at all levels.
• Provided expertise to large financial investment groups in acquisitions and equity/ debt investments enabling successful returns from these investments.
• Led teams performing due diligence reviews of   revenues, expenses, IBNR, accounting, tax, benefits and malpractice for of health care acquisition candidates.
• Directed more than 30 consultants in the establishment of a 300,000 sq ft ambulatory facility for world renowned cancer center, including design and implementation of new business and clinical processes and implementation of new clinical and business systems.
• Provided senior level operational management on day-to-day basis during the recruitment process for permanent replacements.  Supported COO roles for hospitals of up to 500 beds.
• Assisted two USA universities in designing the teaching and clinical programs for a  major Middle East hospital  and developed the health care operational plan for this new  hospital.
• Client List (Partial List)
  • New  York Langone Medical Center
  • Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer
  • University of Connecticut Health Center
  • Temple University Health System and Temple University
  • University of Michigan Health System
  • Columbia University and New York Presbyterian Hospital
  • University Hospital at SUNY- Syracuse
  • Cornell University New York University Medical Center
  • The Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and The Johns Hopkins Hospital
  • Yale University and Yale New Haven Hospital
  • Grady Health System
  • Inova Health System
  • Ardent Health Services
  • Provena Health System
  • GE Capital and Heller Financial

Education:

• BS (Medical Technology – ASCP) – Simmons College, Boston, Massachusetts
• MPH (Health Administration) – Columbia University, New York, New York
• MBA (Finance) – New York University, New York, New York

Contact:

4 Cutting Lane, Weston MA 02493

Telephone Mobile 781-572-7932 Fax- 866-861-5792

email: FranPennell@CavanaughConsulting.org