Dive Brief:
- Finance chiefs in the healthcare industry are wrestling with a critical gap between “expectation and enablement” when it comes to decision-making at their businesses, a recent survey by Big Four firm Deloitte found.
- Seventy-three percent of healthcare CFOs said they are expected to be either “regularly or heavily involved” with critical enterprise decisions in key areas such as consumer affordability or M&A and growth, yet only 49% state they feel properly prepared to contribute to those decisions, the survey found. That’s led to an average 24 percentage-point gap between the expectations finance chiefs face in terms of key decisions and their ability to make those determinations, the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions’ 2026 annual survey found.
- “As financial pressure intensifies across the healthcare sector, decisions once viewed primarily through clinical, operational, or strategic lenses can now carry more direct economic implications, expanding the role finance is expected to play,” the report notes.
Dive Insight:
Boards and executive teams are anticipating their CFOs will be regularly involved across decisions in numerous areas as economic headwinds persist, the annual survey of 32 health plan and 32 health system CFOs found.
The survey detailed seven areas in health organizations where CFOs cite gaps between their expectations of involvement and how well-equipped they feel to do so, including consumer affordability and patient experience, mergers and acquisitions, and technology transformation decisions, such as generative and agentic AI adoption.
The decision readiness gaps between the seven areas could “reflect a mismatch between expanding expectations for CFOs and the organizational systems designed to support the finance function,” Deloitte said.
Finance leaders can offer a unique perspective as their role often places them at the nexus point of the business areas required to make strategic determinations, helping to evaluate “enterprise trade-offs,” but CFOs across the healthcare industry consistently indicate they lack the support they need to do so, according to the report.
The widest “readiness” gap appears when it comes to determinations about consumer affordability, access and patient care strategy, according to the survey. Seventy-four percent of finance chiefs said they are expected to be involved, but only 41% stated they were well-equipped to do so — a 33 percentage point gap.
The gap is smaller when it comes to technology — 64% of CFOs stating they are expected to be involved compared to 48% who said they were well-equipped — but as organizations eye further spending and innovations concerning emerging technologies like AI, that could be subject to change, the report warns.
“Technology remains central to enterprise transformation, particularly as organizations invest in artificial intelligence, automation, and data modernization,” the report noted. “If CFOs are expected to play a larger role in those decisions over time, this gap could become more significant.”
The consistent mismatch between expectations and support could be because many finance functions were built out when the CFO had a “narrower remit”— lacking the reporting structures or data environments needed for the expanded role of the modern finance chief, Deloitte said.
“Without corresponding changes to those systems, finance leaders may need to shape enterprise decisions without the information and support needed to influence them,” the report states.
