Last year’s $515 million deal to bring Summa Health, an Akron, Ohio-based integrated system, under General Catalyst was noteworthy for its novel blend of nonprofit, for-profit and venture capital DNA—so it’s little surprise that its new president and CEO has a heterogeneous portfolio of her own.
Jennifer Eslinger is set to join the $2.2 billion system on Monday. She’s coming from a role as president and chief operating officer of New York’s Rochester Regional Health and before that a leadership role at Henry Ford Health System—both fully integrated nonprofit systems with insurance, medical group and outpatient operations alongside their hospitals—plus a stint at Mobile Infirmary Health System, Alabama’s largest private nonprofit.
Eslinger also spent more than a decade at HCA Healthcare and Tenet Healthcare, two of the country’s largest for-profit hospital chains. Her roles began in practice management before shifting into the acute setting, with “an opportunity along the way to do some academics,” she told Fierce Healthcare. “So, a little bit of everything in my portfolio. I call it my toolbox—I like to get all my tools out and play around with them.”
She’s joining Summa Health in the wake of a transaction that shifted the longtime regional nonprofit into a taxed subsidiary of Health Assurance Transformation Company (HATCo), a healthcare-focused advisory services company that the tech-focused investment firm launched in 2023.
General Catalyst and HATCo promised during the acquisition process that they weren’t eyeing “a quick flip, but a long-term commitment to transformation that benefits the community.” Though the organization wasn’t in dire financial straits, it was operating at a narrow, $8.1 million loss as of 2024, prompting HATCo to dedicate its first year of ownership to “strengthen our foundation” by tightening operations and more recently begin introducing a slew of General Catalyst-backed technologies it said will drive new efficiencies across the system.
“It’s a very unique situation, the only of its kind in the country, and so I think the list of wishes and wants for the person to take this role probably had a little bit more diversity than the typical profile for a health system CEO,” Eslinger said of her appointment. “I certainly would like to think that my toolbox was part of the magic, helping me to now be invited to join this amazing team in this incredible community.”
Ahead of her Sept. 21 start date, Eslinger discussed with Fierce Healthcare her views on the new job, Summa Health’s relationship with General Catalyst and future technology plans, shifting care delivery trends and navigating the headwinds facing an integrated health system in 2026. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Fierce Healthcare: When you think of your “toolbox,” what are the specific skills that you take away from, say, working in a for-profit environment versus a nonprofit? How does that translate?
Jennifer Eslinger: I don’t want to discount the differences, because they’re real, in not-for-profit healthcare providers and for-profit. But one thing I think we tend to lose sight of is that the heart and soul of any health system, any healthcare provider organization, patients are at the center of what we do. The team members that show up, the doctors that show up every single day to do this amazing work, whether they’re showing up too a for-profit or a not-for-profit, really does not change their why.
And so the differences in the tools? Honestly, they’re not that different … [though] I like to think—and these are Jennifer’s words, there’s not a study out there on it—for-profit probably moves a little faster. It has a little bit more agility, a little bit more rigor around operational expectations and accountability. But I don’t think that’s a blanket statement, I think there are varying degrees of that across the industry. But it’s certainly something that I bring with me from my for-profit background—just being able to move fast in a thoughtful way.
I want to jump right in, both feet first, and just get that work started. The team’s done a lot of course, in their first year in this new HATCo-GC model, so I just want to pick that up and run with it as fast as we can—and at a pace and a tolerance that the organization can appreciate, of course.
FC: Speaking of jumping right in, I know that operations have been the focus at Summa right after the transition. Summa was operating at an, admittedly narrow, operating loss in its final 2024 financial statement, but we don’t know what that looks like since going private. Has part of the post-deal process been focused on boosting that operating margin into more comfortable territory?
JE: One-hundred percent, absolutely. The team has put a lot of structure and rigor around what they're calling sprints, and I, of course, at this juncture, would not be able to go deep with you on that, just because I'm not myself well versed yet. But I have had the opportunity, obviously, since our announcement, to start digging into some of that work—a lot of great work happening around how to create efficiency, how to really maximize operational opportunities to improve the bottom line. A lot of team members and leaders engaged in that work, and of course, a lot of work on how to leverage technology, AI, etc., to really boost folks' ability to not do more work, but to do their work in a better, more comfortable, more sustainable way.
It’s too early yet, like I said, for me to opine on exactly what that’s going to look like by year-end, but it does look like the right structure, the right focus areas are a part of that work.
FC: A few weeks ago, Summa unveiled its new tech stack—all GC-backed companies whose projects and tools they’re incorporating into workflows. Are you able to talk at all about those plans, and whether you’re expecting more of these types of rollouts once you’re at the helm?
JE: The stack that was unveiled, they are all in varying stages of deployment across the enterprise. One thing I love [is] the way GC and HATCo are talking about these things as a stack, because it really is all about how all technology needs to talk in a more sensible, logical way. Whether that’s talking to the patient, talking to the EHR, the systems talking to each other, it really is about bringing what is typically a very disjointed, disconnected infrastructure in the tech space together. … It’s an enabler to some of the operational efficiencies and things that we want to bring to the providers, to the frontline nurses, to really help their workflows.
And will there be more? Absolutely yes, a whole litany of products and wishlist of other ideas that folks are working on, or things that are being vetted right now. I think the stack is that initial foundational structure that the organization needs, so that as new ideas and new opportunities come forward or come out of GC and HATCo, we're able to layer them in a more seamless way.
FH: I want to talk a little about Summa’s insurance business, SummaCare. You have that in your toolkit background, but the health insurance ecosystem is in a very interesting place right now. Can you talk a bit about how you’re thinking about that side of the organization as you enter the new role?
JE: Boy, you are spot on. Look everywhere across our country—insurance premiums are rising at just record rates, healthcare costs are rising at unsustainable rates. And when you think about the plan, the ecosystem as a whole at Summa Health … those efficiencies really are also about how we are going to leverage technology, leverage AI, not just to better care for people when they’re right in front of us but before they need us.
Helping with medication compliance, helping with screenings and wellness checks, or just quick and easy answers and access to information for all of our patients. We believe that we can leverage these tools to also drive down the cost of care, which, in turn, directly impacts the ability for SummaCare to help control cost in that insurance space. … And having SummaCare, the inpatient assets, the outpatient and ambulatory assets all work together to really try to drive patient care into the right setting, at the right price, at the right time for every patient. It’s a lofty goal, but I think that’s one of the benefits of being a fully integrated enterprise like Summa Health.
FH: You touched on what seems to be a macro trend among health systems of embracing outpatient, especially when you’re a large health system with a substantial network and doubly so when you’ve got an insured population.
JE: It’s just something that we’re all paying attention to across the nation. You’re really amping up care access, virtually, remote care, care navigation … scheduling appointments easily online, taking appointments online as much as clinically possible … outpatient—the more we can open that access and really make sure that everyone is working top of license, I think it’s going to help because patients will have to wait fewer days or weeks for that next appointment. And in turn, that means fewer patients show up at the ER because they couldn’t get appointments.
We’ve got to make all of that as easy as possible for the patient—and for the providers, because if we just open the floodgates for the patients and let them send a ton of messages that the providers aren’t ready to catch, then we’ve just frustrated everyone. So a lot of what we’re looking at in the stack is enhancing our ability to make these processes easier.
FH: A lot of the policy changes over the past year, or year and a half, have not necessarily favored hospitals’ bottom lines. Summa’s annual report from the end of 2025 showed Medicaid and self-pay trending upward, and those have proven a curveball this year for providers. How are you and Summa looking at these headwinds, and particularly uncompensated care burden?
JE: Obviously it’s an understatement to say we’re watching it at Summa, and I’ll double down and say we’re watching it at Rochester Regional in upstate New York, and we’re watching it across the industry. We’re already here in upstate seeing similar numbers to what you’re referencing in the Summa numbers.
There’s a lot of work in flight, even before technology is fully developed, that the team is doing around finding efficiencies, optimizing workflows. We have to double-down on those because it’s not an either-or. The change and the headwinds in front of us right now really have made this the inflection point in healthcare. We can’t wait on policy to change because, you know, policy is very fickle, it changes every two to four years depending on any cycle politically. So, it’s all the more reason that we have to find ways to fix our broken healthcare system so it is sustainable.
These headwinds just prove [that] any little ripple in the ocean becomes a tidal wave before you know it, and we’ve got to be able to get in front of that to create a more sustainable system. And don’t even get me started on the aging demographic.
FH: Anything else? What have I forgotten to ask you?
JE: With a little levity, I would say you didn’t ask me on a scale from one to 10 of how excited I am. This is such important work, such great work, and I could not be more excited to get started and join this amazing team, and join the Akron [Ohio] community at large.