Forum Faculty

Steven Berger, CPA, FACHE, FHFMA

Steven Berger is Founder and President of Healthcare Insights, LLC, which specializes in the training of healthcare financial and general management issues.  In addition, Healthcare Insights has developed INSIGHTS, a management accountability and decision support software solution for the healthcare industry. 

Prior to his role at Healthcare Insights, Mr. Berger was Vice President, Finance for seven years at 250- bed Highland Park Hospital in suburban Chicago, Illinois.  Before Highland Park Hospital and since 1978, he has been a hospital or health system finance officer in New York, New Jersey and Missouri.

Mr. Berger has 33 years of healthcare financial management experience.  He holds a Bachelors of Science degree in History and a Master of Science in Accounting from the State University of New York at Binghamton.  He is a CPA, a Fellow of the Healthcare Financial Management Association (FHFMA) where he has served as President of the First Illinois Chapter.  Mr. Berger also served a three-year term on the HFMA’s National Board of Examiners and was the Regional Executive of Region 7 of the HFMA.  He is also a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (FACHE).

In addition, over the past several years he has presented many healthcare finance related seminars throughout the United States and Canada including several two-day classes such as Fundamentals of Healthcare Financial Management, Turning Data into Useful Information and Hospital Financial Management for the Non-Financial Manager.  He also teaches two two-day classes for the American College of Healthcare Executives One is titled Creating and Guiding the Information Driven Hospital while the other class is titled Critical Financial Skills for the Hospital Executive.

He has also written several articles over the past two decade on healthcare financial and general management that were published in Healthcare Financial Management magazine, including an August 2004 award-winning article on the Ten Ways to Improve Cost Management in Hospital and the February 2007 award-winning article, Treating Technology as a Luxury: Ten Necessary Tools.

Additionally, Mr. Berger is the author of "Fundamentals of Healthcare Financial Management," originally published in 1999 by McGraw-Hill and the Healthcare Financial Management Association.  This book was written from a practitioners point of view and is a distillation of Mr. Berger's many years on the inside of healthcare institutions.  The third edition of the book was published in January 2008. Additionally, Mr. Berger co-authored the 2002 text, "HFMA's Introduction to Hospital Accounting, 4th edition", published by Kendall Hunt.  Mr. Berger’s 2008 book, "Understanding Nonprofit Financial Statements, 3rd Edition", was published by BoardSource.   His book written for hospital administrators, "The Power of Financial and Clinical Metrics Achieving Superior Results in Your Hospital" was published in March 2005.