About Rachel Barksdale

Headline: The Finance Leader Who Knows Where the Money Goes Missing

Bio: Rachel Barksdale, MHA, CHFP, CSBI is the Founder of Healthcare Finance Innovations — a Jacksonville-based advisory and financial operations firm built exclusively for healthcare organizations.

Her career in healthcare finance spans more than 20 years and both sides of the ledger. She started in the field doing accounts payable and materials management audits with The Audit Group, traveling the East Coast to find where hospitals were losing money in procurement and vendor payments. That ground-level work gave her an operational precision that most finance executives never develop.

From there she moved through cost accounting and senior financial analysis at UF Health Jacksonville and Baptist Health, then into system-level financial planning and analytics at Ascension Florida. At McKesson, she served as a Business Advisor in Healthcare Financial Systems — working with national health systems on performance analytics, cost accounting infrastructure, and the data integrity problems that quietly suppress operating margin.

She brought that cross-sector experience to Florida Blue Medicare, where she currently leads precision health program management including Medicare Advantage risk adjustment and population health initiatives.

HFI was built on everything she learned along the way. From chart of accounts design and bookkeeping cleanup to contribution margin diagnostics and implant cost integrity review, every HFI engagement is practitioner-built — by someone who has worked inside the systems, audited the vendors, and sat in the CFO's chair.

Credentials: Master of Health Administration (MHA) · Certified Healthcare Financial Professional (CHFP) · Certified Specialist in Business Intelligence (CSBI) · QuickBooks ProAdvisor