HFMA member is thankful for the Association’s impact on her life

Candi Powers, CRCA, MBA, a member of HFMA’s West Virginia chapter, “with close ties to the South Carolina chapter,” credits HFMA with changing the trajectory of her life after she became a member in 2005. Powers, who is now the chief revenue cycle officer at Mon Health System in Morgantown, West Virginia, had joined HFMA at the behest of Gina Reckart, then the director of patient accounting at Davis Health System, based in Elkins, West Virginia.

Powers had accepted the supervisor of patient accounting role at Davis to provide support to the director, but that was not how it worked out.

“My first day on the job was the first day that the director of patient accounting was not on the job,” she said. Reckart had left the organization to develop her own company.  “In my first month … when the financial management piece of that job wasn’t filled, I had no choice but to step into that role and learn it. And HFMA is the primary resource that I used in those first six months. HFMA just allowed me to seamlessly assume the director role.”

Powers says it’s difficult to find words that fully express how grateful she feels toward HFMA for providing her with essential resources and a network of healthcare finance professionals to reach out to not only at the beginning of her career, but also throughout it.

“The odds were truly not in my favor to have the life that my family has now,” said Powers.

Powers said she and her husband, Bill, “had nothing” when they started out because they both came from broken homes. “I made it out and I have been able to thrive, but it hasn’t been easy,” she said.

“When we look at where we started 25 years ago, if someone would have told us that we would have two cars, a house, three kids …. the ability to plan a trip to Walt Disney World — these were all things that were out of our reach in 1998.”

In 2011, Powers earned an MBA in finance from West Virginia University, and in 2013, she moved her family to South Carolina to take a revenue cycle director position at Beaufort Memorial Hospital. In 2018, she moved back to West Virginia. She has worked in revenue cycle and been active in HFMA for the past 17 years.

“HFMA is very personal to me because [without its support] I would never have had the opportunities afforded to me, to my family, to be able to do work that I am so passionate about and try to fix what’s broken in this industry, and to contribute to ensuring people have access to healthcare,” Powers said.