The importance of physicians in healthcare systems, mission based leadership, data-led approach.
These are the themes we explore in today’s podcast episode with Annette Marinaccio. This episode is a part of our new “People You Should Know” series, where we spotlight industry professionals shaping the future of life sciences and healthcare.
Meet Annette Marinaccio
…VP of Physician Compensation and Contracting Services at Northwell Health, author of Amazon Bestseller ‘Your Soul Focus’, and someone whose work in physician compensation and healthcare operations stands out as both strategic and meaningful.
She shares her unique journey from being a CPA to becoming a strategic leader in healthcare operations. As Northwell Health’s VP of Physician Compensation and Contracting Services, Annette leads a team that handles one of the most complex and critical aspects of healthcare: making sure physicians are paid fairly, clearly, and on time. Her work lives at the intersection of numbers, operations, and relationships — and she’s built an entire niche around it. In this episode, she shares insights on:
- Her career journey and transition into physicians’ compensation
- Steps she took to centralize a complex healthcare system and retain top talent
- Some of her biggest pain points in her current role, and how she addressed those
- Why every good dashboard starts with an excel sheet
- Why healthcare compensation doesn’t work without taking physicians into consideration
- How she manages her team and external stakeholders to get things done
- Her key strengths and existing solutions that help in physicians’ compensation
- How to get physicians thinking about the care of their patients, vs thinking about EMR or what they’re compensated.
- What performance metrics or practices Annette and her team use to drive results in the culture, help retain top talent, and attract doctors to Northwell
- Her Amazon bestselling book titled Your Soul Focus
- The spiritual side of life after death
- Plus so much more…
You can watch/listen to the video here
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Snippets from the podcast
Anette’s background and what brought her to the healthcare industry.
“So, my background is CPA. I’m really a numbers person. I love Excel, spreadsheets, numbers, math — all that kind of stuff ever since I was young. When I first started in public accounting, I found it interesting that most of the places I audited, I had not audited any healthcare. Most of the people didn’t really enjoy their work. They sort of liked it, but they didn’t love it. So in my 20s, I was starting to learn that maybe people didn’t like what they were doing all the time.
“My first job in industry was in healthcare, and within two months, I was hooked. I loved healthcare. I say I started in October and realized it by the holiday party because, in public accounting with all accountants, it takes quite a while to get people up and on the dance floor, happy and chatting. But in healthcare, they were on the dance floor before it even started! I was like, “Wow, it’s just a different group of people in healthcare. They’re really all in it, most of them for the right reasons.” So I loved healthcare.“
I started as a top administrator for a $7.5 million private practice and was able to grow it over 20 years to a $100 million practice through organic growth and acquisitions — great experience that way.
Annette Marinaccio
“Once I realized that the healthcare market was changing dramatically — really due to the deficit reduction acts of 2007-2008 — I felt I needed a larger platform. The practice I was CEO and CFO for probably wasn’t going to sustain, and I was unable to get the new board at that time to understand the gravity of the situation. So, I jumped to a $2 billion-plus nonprofit and found, my goodness, what a difference between for-profit and nonprofit healthcare. After transferring my skill set there, I wanted an even larger challenge, and I wanted an organization with its corporate headquarters in my neck of the woods — where I lived — to really help my family and friends. That was Northwell, based on Long Island. So I jumped to Northwell and have been there for the last 10 years.“
What drew Anette into the healthcare compensation space in particular? Was there a turning point where she realized this is where she could make the biggest impact?
“There was a turning point when I was at that $2 billion organization. For the first time, I saw the difference between a nonprofit entity and a for-profit one. I had run the for-profit entity. I was in a meeting with a lead doctor, and he said to me, “Knowing what you know about the for-profit physician side and what you’ve seen here in this hospital setting, which department do you think would be best for us to spend our resources on? Accounts payable? Like where?”
“That was really a turning point because it was like a clean slate, but I could only choose one place. I couldn’t cure everything. What would I do? Where would I spend the money? I thought about it for a few days and came back to leadership saying, “Definitely physician compensation and contracting, because physicians are the key. They are talent. They are the ones generating the revenue. It’s all about the physicians.”
If we’re not satisfying them(physicians) personally, then we’re not going to satisfy them professionally. If they’re not comfortable with how we’re paying them — which is the most personal thing to somebody — if it’s not fair and they don’t buy into it, then they’re the ultimate influencer. They influence the people in their office, the staff, the patients, their family, their friends. People listen to doctors. We want them to be personally happy — happy, happy.
Annette Marinaccio
“Yes, we could use additional marketing resources, procurement, accounts payable, managed care negotiation. There are many areas to spend money. But if I had to pick one department, I’d pick physician compensation and contracting. Do something fair, make it understandable, and pay them appropriately according to what was agreed upon. That was a great turning point. Interestingly, I started mentioning that turning point when I was in that middle organization — the $2 billion one, not Northwell. And as the universe would have it, within two or three months of that, I was recruited by Northwell and took the opportunity.“
“At first, I was focused on acquisitions, not physician compensation and contracting. But two months after I arrived, the head of comp and contracting gave notice, and senior leadership came to me saying, “Can you run our comp and contracting department while we figure out what to do?” And I’ve been there ever since. I think the universe heard what I put out in that first organization and said, “Ah, that’s what she wants. Okay, we’ve got something bigger for her.” They put me in a totally different situation, and I love it.“
What are some of Anette’s biggest pain points in her current role, and how has she addressed those?
When I first took the position, someone told me I had the worst job in the whole health system. And he was right.
Annette Marinaccio
“The biggest pain point when I started was really angry doctors — people not being paid appropriately, contracts stalled. It was horrendous in terms of pain points. But because I was able to understand what was needed at Northwell — it took me about a year to a year and a half — I got into a position to communicate to senior leadership what we needed specifically. We were able to cure that acute pain point situation. Now, we’re left with more chronic pain points. They’re not debilitating but they’re still significant. “
“One of them is that there’s a real decentralization to some extent. You’re dealing with so many different stakeholders on one particular product, one contract, one particular physician’s compensation. So, you really need forums to bring everybody together. Another thing you’re dealing with is the involvement of multiple departments. We currently have a fairly robust proprietary IT platform, but most of the existing IT platforms primarily focus on a single aspect of the physician compensation and contracting workflow. And really, it should be far broader than that.“
“Instead of focusing on the entire workflow, maybe it’s focused on the word process and contract aspect of it, or it’s focused on the “let’s pay them for productivity” aspect of it. Or it’s focused on physician recruitment, or for a services agreement, it’s focused on the accounts payable aspect of it.
But in reality, they’re all connected. And it would be great to have one overarching IT platform that really travels from the initial negotiation with a physician through fair market value, through pay-for-productivity, through payroll, through procurement. That would be a panacea.”
Annette about her Amazon best-selling book titled Your Soul Focus.
“In 2006, my mother-in-law died. We were close, but she was my mother-in-law—it wasn’t like she was my mother or anything. But the key is, while she was on the other side, she started showing me that she was still there. And I was like, “What? I don’t even understand this. But I started getting signs, signals—things from my daughter—and I found it very difficult to ignore. I didn’t understand what was going on. So after I understood that it was true, that she literally was still here giving me signs, I spent four years…
Listen to the rest of the episode to know more😉. Prefer reading the rest of the episode instead of listening to it? Open the video above in a new window>>click on the gear icon>>and click on transcript.
Besides what’s listed above, Annette talks about:
- Her key strengths and existing solutions that help in physicians’ compensation
- How to get physicians thinking about the care of their patients, vs thinking about EMR or what they’re compensated.
- What performance metrics or practices Annette and her team use to drive results in the culture, help retain top talent, and attract doctors to Northwell
- The inspiration and journey of writing her bestselling book