Missouri Chapter embarks on Enterprise membership ‘road show’

Enterprise membership in HFMA is flourishing in the Association’s Greater Heartland Chapter.

With four large organizations in the Chapter’s home state of Missouri having joined as Enterprise members, the state is now first  among all HFMA Chapters in total membership, with upwards of 4,500 individual members.

Understanding the importance of acting swiftly to help new members begin to realize all the benefits HFMA has to offer is what prompted Kyle Lee, the FY18-19 president of the Greater Heartland Chapter, to approach leaders from HFMA National with the idea of mounting a “road show” through Missouri. His idea was simply to raise awareness among the Chapter’s new members of the huge opportunity HFMA membership presents them for learning, personal growth, leadership and community.

“We recognize that Enterprise members are often unfamiliar with what HFMA offers,” says Lee, who is an independent healthcare advisor and strategic consultant based in Springfield, Missouri. “As a Chapter, we want to help educate them on the benefits of membership from local, regional and national perspectives. We hope that with outreach to our members, we will see them engage with the Chapter and ultimately benefit both from local relationships within our industry and from the value of timely education in every facet of healthcare.” 

The potential for engaging their many new Enterprise members also was not lost on the Greater Heartland Chapter’s leadership. They decided to create a new role within the Chapter organization for an Enterprise membership liaison, and Lee became the obvious first choice to fill this important position.

The road trip gets underway

One of Lee’s first actions was to enlist the help of HFMA National in launching the “Greater Heartland Chapter Enterprise membership road show” by scheduling an on-site visit at Mercy, a regional health system based in O’Fallon. The idea was to meet with new Enterprise members and educate them on the value of HFMA, and to encourage anyone within the Enterprise member organizations who had not yet signed up to do so. Stepping up to help Lee organize the event were Vincent Lynn, senior Enterprise sales executive for HFMA, and Jill McCart, vice president, accounting and reporting, for Mercy.

“Mercy is excited about investing in our coworkers’ professional development and the education and other benefits with our HFMA Enterprise membership,” says McCart. “We have seen success integrating the education of HFMA into our organization and look forward to a long partnership with HFMA and its chapters in the communities we serve.”

About 60 people from Mercy attended the presentation on-site, with about 100 people watching a live feed from locations as far afield as Oklahoma and Arkansas.

“It was great be able to describe to all those people who we are as an association,” says Lynn. “We talked about the types of people who join HFMA, the resources we produce, how members can network with other professionals across the industry and how they can leverage the webinars, white papers and everything else that we offer to our membership, to help them see how it all can help them further their careers personally.

A new benefit is introduced

Before the presentation, the Chapter leaders met and decided to offer a new benefit to their Enterprise members: They now offer to each Enterprise member organization a certain number of complimentary registrations for their live events based on how many members they each have signed up internally.

“There’s no costs for them to add members internally,” says Lynn. “So the more people that they can inspire to become engaged, the better their return on investment.

“And the whole idea was well received,” he says.  “In fact, one of the people that was attending was keenly interested in an event that the Chapter
was offering the very next morning. And because so many people signed up, he was able to take advantage of this complimentary registration, sign up for the event and attend it the very next day.”

The road show continues

The next step after the Mercy visit was to set up live webinars with two of the other Enterprise member organizations, the St. Louis-based health systems SSM Health and BJC HealthCare. Meanwhile, the road show is moving ahead full steam, with plans for other representatives from HFMA National to give on-site presentations at both these health systems.

As of this writing, there are no immediate plans to visit HFMA’s other Missouri-based Enterprise member organization and business partner, Cerner. But the presentations and webinars developed to date have created a valuable resource that can be used to help all Enterprise members enjoy the benefits of being part of the community that is the “heartbeat of healthcare finance.”