The pressure on health system leaders is stark today, including reimbursement headwinds, workforce strain, the accelerating pace of AI adoption, the relentless push to do more with less.
At Becker’s CEO + CFO Roundtable this fall in Chicago, more than a dozen of the country’s top health system executives spent two days working through those challenges together. The quotes below capture what they said when the conversation turned strategic about on how systems grow without breaking, how integration actually works, what AI demands of leadership and what it means to build a health system that lasts.
We hope to see you at the Becker’s 17th Annual Meeting, April 19–22, 2027, in Chicago — where these conversations continue. Registration is now open here.
Top 12 quotes from the CEO + CFO Roundtable:
“When you do not act like a system, then you’re ripe for disruption. When you come together as a system so that you can see the patient, whether they’re in the physician’s office, in the lab, in the urgent care center, in the acute care center, then you develop what they call customer intimacy.”
Eugene Woods, President and CEO, Advocate Health (Charlotte, N.C.)
“Right now one of the most important things we can do as healthcare leaders is create trust and operate with integrity. There’s a lot of distrust in the health system right now. We read about it in the papers every day. There’s distrust from patients in the healthcare system and I think all of our employees are also patients.”
Kevin Hammons, CEO, Community Health Systems (Franklin, Tenn.)
“Technology in and of itself is not going to deliver us to the horizon that we believe we’re marching to. Technology enabling both patients, members, caregivers, leaders, others who are on our team are going to augment our ability to scale, bring better access and bend cost curves.”
Marjorie Bessel, MD, Chief Clinical Officer, Banner Health (Phoenix)
“We are a mission based organization that needs a business model to serve. The real question for me, as we think about the realities of the impact of this legislation, is how do we try to take that reality, model it, and then do long range financial planning. How can we take what we know right now, plan for the future, with the actual needs of our communities?”
Kerry Heinrich, President and CEO, Adventist Health (Roseville, Calif.)
“If we’re going to deliver this really high quality, differentiated care, we want to be able to provide it to every patient, regardless of whether they’re commercially funded or government funded. In fact, in the time that I’ve been CEO, the percent of patients that we see that are government funded has gone up. And we don’t have a secret strategy to get it down.”
Suresh Gunasekaran, President and CEO, UCSF Health (San Francisco)
“We can no longer define growth as just volume. Historically, hospitals and health systems have been volume, volume, volume. We don’t believe all volume is good volume. We believe we need to grow the right volume, with the right acuity and the right mix.”
Amber Sims, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategy and Growth Officer, Ascension (St. Louis)
“The ones that will distinguish and be successful are the ones who have operational discipline. And then I’d offer that the second characteristic of the ones that will succeed in this compressed margin environment is leadership. We’ve got to change and continue to change the culture. And it starts with me and my executive team.”
Terry Gilliland, MD, President and CEO, Geisinger (Danville, Pa.)
“Every day is cost savings day. I think a big mistake that organizations make is they cut when things get hard and then they grow and you get bloat and you’re in this sort of cycle where you go up and you go down and you go up and you go down. That’s wrong.”
Nick Barcellona, CFO, WVU Medicine (Morgantown, W.Va.)
“Focus on your existing business first. Don’t try to grow on top of an operating chassis or financial chassis that is not sustainable. You’re just perpetuating the problem. Focus on your core business first. Get that to be highly productive, clinically effective utilization and sweat those assets. Then lay the growth as an overlay on top of that and repeat and reproduce that model more broadly.”
Dennis Laraway, CFO, Cleveland Clinic
“If you’re looking for advice to pick one thing, follow the patient. You cannot go wrong doing that. A lot of things we do are not patient centric. Patient centric is following from the moment they call up or go into the system to through when the bill drops, with everything medical in between.”
Jim Molloy, CFO, Ochsner Health (New Orleans)
“Think of AI not as a tool or a toolset or a technology. Think of AI as a capability that we’re going to implement across the entire organization. When you think of it as a capability, the difference is that it’s not a tool anymore; it’s a leadership issue.”
Luis Taveras, PhD, Executive Vice President, Chief Digital and Information Officer, Jefferson Health (Philadelphia)
“AI in healthcare is not an IT or technical project. AI is really about changing the way we work. All of us, across all our roles, need to be intimately involved in designing how we use AI to change healthcare delivery and how we provide care to the patients we serve.”
Adam Landman, MD, Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Information Officer, Brown University Health (Providence, R.I.)
At Becker's 4th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, taking place November 2–5 in Chicago, more than 1,500 hospital and health system executives tackle decisions that determine whether organizations thrive or merely survive: protecting margins under cost pressure, choosing where to grow, renegotiating payer relationships, stabilizing the workforce and proving real ROI on technology. This is where leaders work through them together, face-to-face. Apply for complimentary registration now.
