Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
Overall Excellence > Email Newsletter of the Year

Title of entry: 
FastFinance - Email Newsletter of the Year

Issue or Publication date:
Sept. 24, 2025: $50 billion rural healthcare fund distribution plans detailed; Oct. 29, 2025: 340B group putting final touches on reform bill; Nov. 19, 2025: ACA subsidy vote planned as government reopens

Publication name: 
FastFinance

View Website home page:
hfma.org

Entry URLs

Entry Essay: 
HFMA's FastFinance weekly e-newsletter was designed specifically for busy hospital and health system CFOs looking for any nugget of new information that will help them in their day-to-day responsibilities. Our goal was lofty: Break new reporting ground every week and provide news and analysis healthcare executives simply can’t get elsewhere.

Packed into a snappy, visual package, we knew we had a hit on our hands in the early going when the CFO of one of the largest health systems in the country told us he felt he couldn’t “not read FastFinance every week” for fear of missing something he needed to see. In fact, a survey of the CFO readership found 91% felt the product was personalized just for them.

Conceived by Vice President of Content Brad Dennison and former Congressional Quarterly and Modern Healthcare reporter Rich Daly, FastFinance represents e-news as a robust business line, now complete with a companion podcast, monthly webinars coming in 2026 and live sessions at national events.

Featuring an open rate of nearly 50%, the subscriber list continues to grow daily and has wide appeal to professionals across the healthcare finance spectrum. And those who open the newsletter statistically open it again 100% of the time.

In just a year, FastFinance has established itself as a recognizable brand both inside and outside of HFMA in the healthcare industry, with Dr. Paul Keckley – a well-known industry analyst and expert – recently calling Daly “the best healthcare reporter in the country.”

One example of a story healthcare executives cannot get anywhere else is the FastFinance article “CMS warns it may reject state-directed payments" (Sept. 24 issue, story 2). Daly found recently issued sub-regulatory guidance for a program that generates $100 billion annually for the healthcare sector.

Identifying and obtaining insights from the experts who track this program defined the extent to which this low-profile guidance could impact the sector’s ability to obtain those funds going forward. An exhibit illustrating how much various states had obtained, year-to-date, from this program for their hospitals came via Daly's single-handed review of more than 100 approved state applications under the program.