In this episode

Omer Sultan has seen significant change throughout his career in healthcare — both for the industry as a whole and for the role of the chief financial officer at leading healthcare organizations. In this episode, he covered how the CFO role has changed and expanded, and how he plays a key role in MD Anderson Cancer Center’s organizational initiatives as its CFO. He covered the following themes:

• CFOs are focused on smart growth in how their organizations serve patients.
• The CFO is now a vital strategic partner for health system leadership.
• CFOs can be most effective when they work across the aisle, not top-down.

“The role of the CFO has evolved. There was a time when they were considered the individuals who called balls and strikes. The CFO has become a vital strategic partner in helping advance an organization’s goals.”

– Omer Sultan

Key takeaways

Sultan discussed his own path to the role of CFO at MD Anderson Cancer Center, and how his work today reflects the broader evolution of the CFO role. He covered the following ways that they CFO is critical to the mission, goals, and growth of a healthcare organization:

CFOs are focused on smart growth in how their organizations serve patients.

Throughout the discussion, Sultan emphasized that the CFO is part of a holistic approach to organizational growth, improvement, and care delivery.

At MD Anderson, demand for cancer services is unfortunately growing – and Sultan understands the need to continue to grow both the business and improvements to how patients access care. “Our focus is on growing our scale, but also making it easier for patients to access us. And sometimes it’s not the physician they interact with first, it’s somebody from my team who they are working with to get cleared from an insurance standpoint,” he said.

“I talked to our leadership team and leaders across the organization about being focused on smart growth,” Sultan said. He sees the focuses of finance and clinical leaders dovetailing to help accomplish this goal. “I look at core services or shared services, and how to make those more efficient, and our clinical leaders are looking at technology to make care more seamless.”

The CFO is now a vital strategic partner for health system leadership.

Sultan discussed the vital role that today’s CFO plays in ensuring that their healthcare organization is successful. He acknowledged that the scope of the CFO’s influence was more limited in the past, but noted that now the CFO is critical to organizational strategy.

“The role of the CFO has definitely evolved. There was a time when CFOs were considered basically the individuals that called balls and strikes…strictly telling people what happened, not what’s going to happen,” said Sultan. “I think that role [has evolved to] the CFO becoming a really vital strategic partner, to the CEO and leadership team on helping advance an organization’s goals.”

Sultan said that the CFO is crucial in monitoring the success of the organization’s initiatives – especially those that involve technology investments – as well as finding more resources to devote to the most important priorities.

“Strong partnership has to exist with chief technology officers, digital officers, the CIO. The whole portfolio demands a lot of care and feeding; [it involves] a lot of investments. It’s working with them, ensuring that we’re making the right strategic bets and allocations, and being able to look back and see how they’re doing to start, stop, or continue the investment.”

He continued, “We can work together to deliver technologies that not only advance clinical care, but also take out unnecessary waste within the organization…[focusing] on, ‘”How is this driving better bottom-line performance?'”

CFOs can be most effective when they work across the aisle, not top-down.

Sultan sees evolution in the CFO role not just in how CFOs work with other leaders, but also in the way CFOs lead and collaborate across the organization. “It’s less about command and control, and more about cultivating and coordinating,” he said. “Many organizations are matrixly oriented, so it’s less about your ability to [create] initiatives top-down, and more about your ability to really to work across the aisle, across multiple stakeholders, internal and external, within the organization.”

He offered tips for CFOs and their teams for collaborating with other roles: “I tell my team, ‘it’s not what you know – it’s what your audience needs to know.’ There is apprehension toward finance, and so you need to communicate at a level where [other teams] understand what you’re delivering and are able to take action.”

“Finance teams need to be strong business partners, and CFOs need to be great collaborators,” Sultan said. “I don’t want to be known as the CF-no.”