How Prime Healthcare Established Their Formal Budget Process With Vena

Prime Healthcare instituted formal budget process after not having one for 20 years

VP of FP&A was able to use Vena to run the budget process on his own, without adding more full-time employees

Easier analysis of potential acquisitions or divestments, with real-time model of M&A prospects

Now when we close our books, we do our variance analysis, we forecast the remainder of the year for any known updates and we do our budget, which all rolls into my three-to-five-year projection model that I work with investors and banks on. It gives me a pulse of the entire enterprise

Matthew Ennen

VP of FP&A, Prime Healthcare

The Challenge: Managing a Multi-Billion-Dollar Hospital Network With No Formalized Budgeting Process

Prime Healthcare, a multi-billion-dollar enterprise based in southern California, has a broad reach and presence, operating dozens of hospitals and hundreds of outpatient locations across 14 states. Astonishingly, they managed all this with no formalized budgeting or financial forecasting process.

That’s the situation that Matthew Ennen, Vice President of FP&A at Prime Healthcare, was staring down when he joined the company in 2021. Lacking the resources to institute a full-bore financial planning and analysis (FP&A) team, he turned his attention to software. He needed a game-changing solution, and a way to leverage fundamental financial tools such as Excel while giving him the broader capabilities he needed. That’s why he chose Vena.

Doctor happy infant kid and chest assessment in clinic, hospital and medical analysis

Looking Forward, Not Just Backward, With Vena

After he started using Vena to wrangle Prime Healthcare’s FP&A operations, Matthew says he’s managed to work through the big items on his to-do list. “As a one-man FP&A shop,” he explains, Matthew’s been able to consolidate and analyze data from 44 hospitals, and “easily slice and dice the data.”

Further, he says that his main concerns—that other employees wouldn’t use Vena to its full potential—didn’t come to pass. “It was a smooth transition,” he says, adding that he created his own templates which helped make for a seamless transition. Plus, Vena’s Excel-based interface was a natural fit for the numerous CFOs and other financial stakeholders in Prime Healthcare’s ranks.

Ultimately, Matthew was able to implement an FP&A system that works across Prime Healthcare’s vast network, do so quickly (implementing within 65 days) despite having a lean team, and pivot the company from a backward-looking financial planning perspective to looking at the present and future.