photo by: LMH Health

LMH Health CFO Mike Rogers is pictured alongside the hospital's main campus at 325 Maine St.

After a search process that’s been underway since May, LMH Health has hired its next chief financial officer.

The hospital’s new top financial executive is Mike Rogers, a senior executive with 28 years of experience in the health care field. Rogers most recently served as regional chief financial officer for St. Mary’s Hospital’s Texoma Medical Center in Oklahoma City, a 1,200-bed community hospital system that serves central Oklahoma and Texas.

An LMH Health spokesperson told the Journal-World that Rogers’ strengths are in accounting, finance, operations, forecasting, compliance, cost reduction and analysis, strategic and market planning, investing, capital projects and complex contract negotiations.

Rogers was introduced to the LMH Health Board of Trustees during the group’s meeting on Wednesday.

“Mike comes to us with a lot of excellent executive financial leadership in a setting that will be very complementary and I think valuable to us,” LMH Health President and CEO Russ Johnson told the group Wednesday.

The hospital’s last permanent financial executive, Deb Cartwright, departed in May for a position at Kaiser Permanente’s Maui Memorial Medical Center in Hawaii. Cartwright had been with LMH Health since December 2019. In the time between May and today, Krys Claymore, the former CFO of Olathe Health, had served as LMH Health’s interim CFO.

Rogers joins LMH Health as the hospital looks to bounce back from ending 2022 with a roughly $6 million budget deficit, as the Journal-World reported. At that time, Tom Sloan, then the chair of the LMH Health Board of Trustees, said health care systems across the country were facing an “extraordinarily challenging financial landscape,” with even more hospitals projected to end 2023 with budget deficits compared with the more than 40% of systems that did last year. Johnson at that time attributed the financial challenges of 2022 to supply chain, inflation and workforce struggles that combined for about $14 million in expenses.