Buffy Kelly

Buffy has more than 25 years of experience helping healthcare organizations realize performance improvement and financial turnarounds.

Improving margins and redesigning how we work is essential to being able to build capital and focus on future growth.”

About Buffy

Buffy leads performance improvement and workforce optimization engagements for healthcare organizations, driving results quickly while building a sustainable model to ensure clients can maintain the savings they achieve long term.

She has experience in management structure redesign, span of control, operational improvement implementation, and work redesign in clinical and corporate services areas. Buffy also has expertise in facilitating organizational change to drive financial improvements, including incorporating automation and virtual solutions, enabling remote workforces, outsourcing, redesigning and optimizing staffing and how work is done, breaking down siloes, and creating opportunities to function better as a system. She also brings expertise in union environments.

Throughout her career, Buffy has:

• Led a turnaround engagement focused on cost reduction and growth strategy for a large health system in the Northwest spanning academic medical centers and a school of medicine, realizing between $315 million and $655 million in reduced costs over three years.
• Led a span of control implementation for a large health system resulting in over $24 million in savings.
• Led a large margin improvement engagement for a five-hospital system, including span of control, corporate services, and workforce management, with a midpoint goal of $15 million, resulting in over $24 million of realized improvement.
• Managed an integrated project spanning two hospitals that included workforce management, revenue cycle, clinical documentation improvement, supply chain, pharmacy, length of stay, status management, and patient throughput, resulting in over $20 million of improvement.

Prior to joining Huron, Buffy worked in multiple healthcare organizations as a front-line clinical laboratory scientist and in laboratory management, and also owned her own consulting firm.

Buffy earned her Master of Science in leadership from Southwestern College and her Bachelor of Science in medical technology from the University of Wyoming.

Buffy is a member of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE) and the American Society for Clinical Laboratory Science (ASCLS).