Tenet Healthcare has promoted Chief Operating Officer Dr. Saum Sutaria to president and COO, the company announced Tuesday.
Sutaria will assume direct responsibility for Tenet's United Surgical Partners International unit as well as for Conifer Health Solutions. He will continue to head the company's hospital operations for its 65 hospitals and about 500 other facilities including surgical and outpatient centers.
"Since joining the company as COO, Saum has demonstrated superb business judgment and greatly contributed to the improvements in our financial results over the last few quarters," Tenet CEO and Executive Chairman Ron Rittenmeyer said in a statement.
Prior to joining Tenet in January 2019, Sutaria worked for McKinsey & Co. for 18 years, where he was a leader in the healthcare and private equity practices.
Dallas-based Tenet announced in July that it planned a tax-free spinoff of Conifer, its revenue cycle subsidiary, making it a separate, publicly traded company. That is slated for 2021, pending regulatory approvals and other processes.
Last week, the company announced it had agreed in principle to pay the federal government about $66 million to settle a whistleblower lawsuit alleging it billed public programs for services provided by physicians who had improper financial relationships with an Oklahoma surgical hospital partly owned by Tenet.
For the third quarter of 2019, Tenet reported adjusted EBITDA was $631 million compared to $577 million in the third quarter of 2018, an increase of 9.4%. On a same-hospital basis, net patient service revenue was $3.6 billion, up 5.8% from the third quarter of 2018.