A Strategic Look at What’s Driving CSO Decision-Making
Gain exclusive insight into the priorities and concerns shaping the minds of leading Health System Chief Strategy Officers. This session distills the key themes from our closed-door Spring 2025 forum gatherings, offering strategic takeaways for industry partners looking to better align with today’s financial decision-makers.
Forum Takeaways
Learn how Chief Strategy Officers are adapting to changes in their roles, navigating strategic tradeoffs, risk mitigation, and updates from federal health policy actions.
CSOs play the key role of “truthteller” and “contrarian” in health systems. This requires close relationships with the rest of the C-suite (especially the CEO), and internal competencies with data analysis.
CSO tend to work on 1-4 year time horizons, and serve as their organization’s “jack-of-all-trades,” moving between multiple issue areas. Time management and competing priorities are major problems for strategic planning.
“We’re more like The Cheesecake Factory versus a steakhouse. We have too many things on the menu.”
CSOs and their deputies have fewer direct reports than other teams in the C-Suite. This helps them maintain objectivity, but it also makes it harder to advocate for titles and compensation.
Strategy teams are deploying AI tools as a force multiplier, but they’re also keenly aware of their limits as a replacement for analyst-level work.