Jonathan Ma recalls being at his parents’ home in Nebraska one Saturday when his Morgan Stanley boss called with advice: pursue an opportunity at Sutter Health. After nearly 15 years, the mentor believed the retiring treasurer’s position could be Ma’s next step.
Ma tells us he had not considered the opportunity. Although he knew Sutter Health’s mission and some of its people, he says the call “planted” the seed. His mentor had seen something in him that he had not yet recognized.
That moment echoed the way Ma describes his development at Morgan Stanley. He credits leaders in San Francisco and New York with teaching him to take his work seriously without taking himself too seriously. According to Ma, that meant remaining curious, asking questions, and admitting when he did not know an answer.
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Ma says trust arrived gradually rather than through a breakthrough. Clients gave him room to learn because they saw that he would work hard, uphold values and ethics, and protect their interests. He moved from mentoring interns to leading financings and presenting before boards.
At Sutter Health, Ma applies that same emphasis on trust. He tells us finance must balance growth, expenses, and margins so the not-for-profit system can continue reinvesting in its communities. Budgets, he says, should represent shared accountability across the organization rather than a finance exercise.
For Ma, leadership emerges incrementally: through questions asked, credibility earned, support accepted, and difficult decisions made while an organization still possesses both “the means” and “the will.”
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CFOTL: For listeners who might be new to Sutter Health, what care does it provide? Who does it serve? And where is the opportunity?
Ma: Sutter Health is a not-for-profit healthcare system based in Northern California. We have nearly 30 hospitals and several hundred clinics, with aligned physicians numbering about 7,000 or 8,000, depending on what you include. We serve primary care and specialty care, and we have ambulatory surgery centers and home health. Generally, we’re roughly the 10th- or 11th-largest health system in the United States. We serve about 3.5 million people annually. It’s a mission-driven organization. We’ve been experiencing a lot of growth over the past few years and are continuing to try to make our communities healthier while also looking out for our people. Our mission is “caring for patients first and people always.” We continue to think about that every day, and it’s always top of mind.
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CFOTL: Sutter more than doubled its capital investment in 2025. How does its nonprofit model shape those priorities?
Ma: What I communicate often to our teams and colleagues is that, as a not-for-profit, every dollar we save and every dollar we earn is reinvested back into our communities. I have to acknowledge that Sutter Health is an organization that has grown through a lot of other medical groups or local hospitals that, in some cases, have served their communities for over 100 years. These are deeply storied organizations and clinicians that have been committed to the healthcare of Northern California for a very long time, and we take that mission seriously. We also have to balance that with financial sustainability. My job as chief financial officer is to balance the growth, expenses, and overall margins so that we can generate enough sustainability to continue to reinvest, build new clinics and hospitals, and continue to care for the people we live with and our neighbors.
CFOTL: Sutter has a complex revenue model. In plain terms, how do patient service and premium revenue work differently?
Ma: Overall, in the healthcare industry, as many people might be aware, there has generally been a shift to value-based care. People typically have their healthcare services paid for by Medicare, Medi-Cal, or commercial payers. Depending on the insurance plan, that typically shows up as net patient service revenue if you’re looking at our financial statements. Premium revenues are generally related to our own health plan. We have a Sutter Health Plan with about 100,000 members here in Northern California. If we are the plan provider—not just providing services, meaning physician services, but actually serving as the insurance company as well—that will show up in premium revenues.
CFOTL: What gives you the earliest read on revenue—patient volume, care mix, or available capacity?
Ma: It’s a combination of all those factors. Typically, I look almost every day at our leading indicators—the volumes we’re seeing in our hospitals and clinics and how much capacity we have. That will usually translate into where we might see the revenue forecast for the rest of the month. Being in healthcare, there’s also a lot of volatility in any given month. Sometimes there are regulatory changes, and at different times of the year we might encounter different revenue ups and downs. We take that into account in our forecasting, but generally we look at patient volumes as a leading indicator for revenue.
Sutter Health | www.sutterhealth.org | Sacramento, CA