The Exec: CFO Paula Tinch Finishes Up Work at Penn State Health

As Tinch prepares for her retirement, she looks back at the strategies, successes and challenges that have shaped her career.

Paula Tinch joined Penn State Health as its executive vice president of finance and CFO in 2019. Now, she is preparing to pass the baton to her successor.

Originally Tinch was set to retire at the end of January 2025, but when asked to stay with her team until June, she said the decision was an easy one.

“Pretty easy to say yes when you know when you have a great team and we've had a lot of really great momentum,” Tinch said.

Throughout her time at Penn State Health Tinch was a stabilizing force for the organization, especially during the pandemic where she led the finance team through COVID challenges and helped the system avoid layoffs that health systems across the country were experiencing.

The Steady Grind

In 2024, Tinch played a significant role in the system’s financial turnaround, setting it up for a much brighter year in 2025. In 2023, Penn State Health’s losses were mainly attributed to debt and expenses related to two recently opened hospitals, plus general increased costs from inflation, worker shortages, and supplies.

Tinch said a large component to finding this stabilization was the system’s specific internal call to action coming together in the form of a project launch titled Project F.I.T: financial improvement taskforce.

“It was really [about] engaging leaders and team members across the organization to kind of spark their change efforts and create some local ownership,” Tinch said. The process was also about expediting further integration, since Penn State Health has morphed as an organization over the last several years.

 “Every year the system has changed in a way that it didn't exist the year before,” Tinch said.

For example, the system now has a centralized office that manages all of its contracted labor.

“It was creating some of those structures that are leveraging our size and scale, but making sure that it was broken down in a way that it was easier to leverage that size and scale,” Tinch said. “And we certainly have more to do, but that was laying the foundation and really getting everybody engaged.”

One thing Tinch is particularly excited for in her last few months at the system is the launch of its integrated Epic electronic health record (EHR), which will formally launch at the end of March. Epic is overwhelmingly the EHR of choice for academic medical centers.

“I'm sure it's going to be successful for the organization,” Tinch said.

The health system has also accomplished much in terms of partnerships and acquisitions. Tinch led the finance strategy here to acquire and integrate several private practice physician groups and build several new Penn State Health Medical Group locations.

“When I think about the past handful of years, we've really accelerated a lot of the acquisitions and practices, whether it's smaller practices, medium or large,” Tinch said. “It's really about facilitating that stabilizing clinical expertise in the community, as well as collaborating and strengthening that clinical backbone through different partnerships, bringing it in to grow the services that complement the services that we have.”

Behind The Numbers

As Tinch looked back on her career, she recalled some of the advice she had been given over the years.

“I had somebody always tell me, it's obviously more than numbers,” Tinch said.

CFOs know this but taking the moments to meditate on what the root concept of the job pursues can help to reframe the work when it gets challenging, which in healthcare, can be often.

“I can report on numbers. Everybody can be good at numbers,” Tinch said. “[But] I'm always looking at the history, right? You're always looking behind you to get those numbers, but I think it's trying to really understand the story behind the numbers and the patients that make up the story behind the numbers.”

CFOs don’t need to be experts at everything, Tinch explains.

“But building a great team of those experts around you that you can rely on is key,” Tinch said. “You want to be able to hand it off and make sure that we can transition that information in a valuable way so that people can interpret it.”

According to Tinch, shifting data and information across different working groups in healthcare is a part of what makes the industry so complex, which is something that isn’t too often discussed amongst healthcare professionals.

“The complexity that we have all layered on to healthcare, I think we don't talk about enough,” Tinch said.

“I think there has to be some simplicity layered in behind it, which means peeling back some of the things that I think have been layered on over time that have all good intents and purposes, but have layered on costs.”