Fern Nerhood, MBA, MSW

Fern Nerhood, M.B.A., M.S.W. is Director, Management Services and Senior Analyst at Rockburn Institute.

Ms. Nerhood has focused on analyzing Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) data and performance measures for six years and has worked with the administration of healthcare and social services since 1999.

Ms. Nerhood works with hospitals and provider systems to understand CMS measures, their performance, and the resulting financial incentives. This requires understanding the policies behind the measures, how different measures relate to each other, and the vast quantity of data that create the measures. In particular, Ms. Nerhood has done multilayered analysis of Medicare Spending Per Beneficiary (MSPB), Value Based Purchasing (VBP), Hospital Acquired Conditions (HAC), Healthcare Associated Infections (HAI), and Overall Hospital Quality Star Ratings.

Different types of care and care pathways post-discharge also impact care outcomes, resource use, and the resulting measure scores. Additionally, Ms. Nerhood has worked with actuarial data and modeling to analyze healthcare policy and programs while estimating cost saving opportunities.

In other areas of the healthcare sector, Ms. Nerhood analyses data and creates extensive reports for industry providers to help them understand how use of their products or services correlates with hospital trends and CMS measure performance. Ms. Nerhood has also developed return on investment (ROI) models to quantify the benefit that programs and educational interventions are having on healthcare organizations. Distilling complicated data and calculations into clear summaries and reports is critical for developers, sales teams, and management. Some analyses focus on one hospital, while others look at hospital systems, and others look at all hospitals nationwide that provide Medicare services.