EXECUTIVE SPOTLIGHT
Raj Garg: A Healthcare Leader Shares His Views on the Industry’s Challenges Raj Garg is a former CEO, McKinsey Senior Partner, healthcare attorney and physician. This background gives him a broad and deep perspective on nearly every corner of the health care industry. In particular, we were impressed in our conversation with Raj at his rare ability to integrate across subsectors of health care. His talents for insight and leadership have given him a unique point of view on how to deal with some of the great challenges in healthcare. He’s a strategic, inspirational, values-based leader with a proven P&L track record. He led the Cancer Treatment Centers of America as CEO and president. He served on its board and its executive, finance & risk, science, strategic growth, and talent committees. In a short time, he orchestrated a massive turnaround that sustained the $4.5 billion enterprise by reducing costs, attracting a strong leadership 9 | HS&M JULY/AUGUST 2019
team, creating a culture of accountability, and establishing a strategy for growth. He has a reputation for courageous and tireless leadership—often in short supply— among his peers, as well as those that worked with him at CTCA. Prior to CTCA, Raj spent 25 years as a leader in healthcare at McKinsey & Company. There he advised CEOs and C-suite executives of leading companies in the U.S., Europe and Asia. His experiences span the business value spectrum, including strategy, M&A, postmerger integration, sales and marketing, and operations. His clients included top ten companies across biopharma, medical device, ancillary service, and provider/payor subsectors. In short, there’s hardly a corner of this industry where Raj does not have experience or where he has not applied his considerable wisdom. Given our focus on hospital
systems in this issue, we asked Raj a few questions that drew from his experience on both sides of the table. Q: Given your recent turnaround experience with CTCA, what observations would you have for our readers on hospital providers? Hospital systems have been and remain under significant financial pressure as health care costs remain a central policy issue. For many institutional providers, 3 percentage points is a good margin. We are seeing some bifurcation among providers—for example, the regional IDNs (Integrated Delivery Networks) seem to be gaining the upper hand on performance and growth given their greater holistic alignment of incentives and scale. For other providers, it’s a paper thin margin. The accelerated turnaround that I orchestrated at CTCA, an
