Chris Allen became executive vice president and CFO of UChicago Medicine Sept. 1, 2025, but it wasn’t his first time walking the system’s halls. In his early career, Mr. Allen served as a budget analyst in the University of Chicago’s Basic Science Division in the mid-1990s.
“It was kind of surreal because the executive suite is actually in the same place that it was when I worked here before,” Mr. Allen said on the Becker’s CFO and Revenue Cycle Podcast. “When I walked down the hallway my first day, I actually walked past the room where my office was back in the ’90s.”
Prior to joining UChicago Medicine, Mr. Allen served as CFO of Los Angeles-based Keck Medicine of USC. With more than 30 years of healthcare experience, Mr. Allen rejoined UChicago Medicine, which had grown into a seven-hospital system with just over $6 billion in revenue as it finished the fiscal year 2026.
Mr. Allen said his first 365 days in the role have mostly focused on improvements to how finance partners with operations and strengthening forecasting and capital planning. UChicago Medicine is also in a major time of expansion, including off-campus clinics, ambulatory surgery centers and an $800 million cancer center that will open next April.
When asked if the system has plans for acquisitions, Mr. Allen said “you never know.”
“There’s always acquisition opportunities, and as we continue to grow our footprint, mostly in Northwest Indiana, there’s always going to be the opportunity for us to continue to grow,” he said. “We only have one small micro-hospital in that area, so that is another space that we know, especially from a…population growth standpoint. That’s an area that we continue to want to have opportunities to grow, and so hospital acquisition may be something that we look at into the future.”
Mr. Allen listed three trends shaping his financial strategy: federal and state legislative activity, including activities tied to HR 1 given UChicago Medicine’s position as Illinois’ largest Medicaid provider; increasingly active payer behavior, prompting a systemwide overhaul of its revenue cycle processes; and the growing role of artificial intelligence, particularly as the system prepares for its new cancer center.
To keep up with new technologies amid its expansion plans, UChicago Medicine has created both an AI intake committee and a governance committee to vet new technology and ensure the tools align with its mission.
“[The cancer center] is going to be one of the most operationally, clinically and innovative buildings in the world, and there will be a multitude of artificial intelligence activities happening in this building,” he said. “We also have to think about, how do we govern ourselves around AI? When is it right to use and not use? How do we have that activity be patient friendly? How do we have it so patients understand when we’re using it and give them the option to use or not to use? Then how do we bring it into our everyday work environment to make us more efficient, while still making sure that we’re using our own intelligence and not only allowing the artificial intelligence to do the work.”
