At St. Louis-based Ascension, Executive Vice President and CFO Saurabh Tripathi said data analytics isn’t an afterthought in finance — it’s part of it.
“Strategy and finance have to be intertwined,” Mr. Tripathi said on an episode of the “Becker’s CFO and Revenue Cycle Podcast.” “Strategy without data is not a strategy, in my opinion.”
It’s this approach that supported Ascension’s $3 billion turnaround, which narrowed its operating loss to $120 million (-0.2% margin) in fiscal 2026, a $371 million improvement from fiscal 2025.
Mr. Tripathi touted Ascension’s alignment between strategy, finance and data analytics, and said its data scientists and engineers look at about 16 petabytes of data across the system. For movie lovers, he equated that level of data to about 800 years of film watching. The team then relies on that data to decide where patients want care delivered and how it can be delivered more efficiently.
“Based on data, we decide what our strategy should be to take care of our patients, serve the patients where they want that care to be delivered, and how efficiently we can deliver that care, taking out some of the inefficiencies from the system,” he said.
Mr. Tripathi pointed to an example that highlighted that same analysis regarding Ascension’s portfolio decisions.
Around two and a half years ago, Ascension had approximately 140 hospitals across the U.S. In some states, Mr. Tripathi said, the system did not have payer leverage to negotiate good rates or a presence to drive operational efficiencies from areas like supply chain or cost control.
In a “bold move,” the system divested in certain geographies. In Alabama, Ascension transferred its hospitals to the University of Alabama at Birmingham, an academic system with stronger payer rates.
“Frankly, both parties benefited from that transaction, and the patients are still taken care of by a really good academic system,” Mr. Tripathi said. “That’s just one example … where we use data analytics to drive our strategy [that] ultimately led to an operational action.”
Looking ahead, Mr. Tripathi said when providing care, it’s important to “follow the puck where the puck is going,” with data pointing toward outpatient care.
Payers, CMS and patients increasingly want outpatient care, and patients find it “less cumbersome,” he said. That shift ultimately led to Ascension finalizing its $3.9 billion acquisition of AmSurg in June, growing its ASC footprint from 58 centers to more than 300 across 34 states.
“As finance leaders, we have to continue to navigate through that and help our operators take care into [the] outpatient setting, drive some of the operational cost out of the system, and at the same time, work with our payer partners in negotiating better rates in ambulatory settings, so we can continue to drive overall profitability,” Mr. Tripathi said.
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