Healthcare 'strategy guy'

Zachary Blackhurst is BPA's Rising `Runner

By California State University, Bakersfield

February 11^th, 2020

Editor's note: Zachary Blackhurst is one of four 2020 Alumni Rising Runners, CSUB graduates of the last 10 years already making a mark with their careers.

Choose jobs you will enjoy doing, even if they pay a little less. Jump at opportunities to challenge yourself. Embrace change.

Those are among the mottos Zachary Blackhurst has followed while moving up in the world of health care finance in his hometown of Bakersfield.

He’s chief financial officer of Bakersfield Family Medical Center, a network of primary care doctors and specialists throughout Kern County and whose parent company is one of the largest physician-owned medical groups in the nation.

Blackhurst is a strategy guy, not an accountant, he’s quick to point out, working with senior managers to grow the business and deliver medical services better. He got there by knowing what he wanted to do, pursuing opportunities to do them, and taking chances along the way.

The son of two Kern County civil servants – his mom was a Department of Human Services accounting supervisor and his dad a County Counsel’s office attorney – Blackhurst earned his bachelor’s degree in public administration from San Diego State in 2006 but discovered he’d rather work in private business.

After college he worked for the Bakersfield construction supply company Architectural Products and Services, running the office, handling accounts payable and receivable, and making deliveries, basically anything the owner needed. That’s where his first set of advice for young college graduates comes in: expose yourself to as much as possible and get your foot in the door somewhere.

“Your first job isn’t going to be your forever job,” he said. “Don’t think, ‘I’m not going to do or take this job that I kind of want to do because I don’t think I’ll want to do it in 10 or 20 years.’”

While working at the company and after it shuttered, Blackhurst earned his MBA from CSUB. Truxtun Radiology hired him as an analyst, introducing him to problem-solving in health care.

At the time, Truxtun Radiology was being bought by RadNet, a national, publicly traded company. Thriving in a new industry, even in the face of something frightening like a company purchase, taught Blackhurst to be open to change.

“Change is really scary, which I understand. It’s still scary for me, too,” he said. “But it’s going to happen. So just be prepared for that and willing to just kind of go with the flow and see what comes of it.

“If you’re performing your best and you ‘re doing good work, change can be a good thing.”

Blackhurst’s focus was on contract analysis and revenue recognition, and the work took him throughout California. Because RadNet publicly traded its shares, Blackhurst also took on the hugely important job of reporting revenue and reserves to the SEC.

Blackhurst got involved with the local Financial Management Association, which was holding symposiums on things like Obamacare, and through it came to know Bob Severs, CEO of GEMCare, another major local physicians group.

That led to a job offer he accepted: decision support analyst, figuring out answers to questions like how changes in the health ratings of patients would affect Medicare payments. After a while, Blackhurst grew restless creating reports for other people to make decisions with and told his boss.

“You know, look, this is where I’m feeling kind of stuck,” he told him. “I think I can do more.”

Blackhurst’s boss took it up the ladder and Blackhurst was named manager of finance and business development, giving him a chance to dig into the weeds of finance data and engage with customers and clients – current and hopefully future ones.

From there GEMCare promoted him to director of finance and gave him dual roles: CFO for a private medical group it was managing, which included operations work he hadn’t done before, and managing a finance team for risk-sharing agreements between Dignity Health hospitals and physician groups in the Los Angeles area.

The job required a lot of travel to Southern California, which later started burning him out, and so Blackhurst made himself open to overtures by BFMC’s chief operating officer to come work there.

“I didn’t want to jump around all the time, but I also didn’t want to limit myself if an opportunity came around,” Blackhurst said.

He so agonized over whether to take BFMC’s offer to be its CFO that he lost weight. He reached out to people he thought could understand what he was going through – another pro tip – and they assured him he had the chops to take on the bigger role.

“They said, ‘You’re doubting yourself too much,’” Blackhurst recalled. “’You’ve got this. What’s the wort that could happen? You try something and you fail.’”