Furst Group Recruits CFO for Baystate Health

October 29, 2020 – Following a national search, Furst Group, which serves the healthcare and insurance industries, assisted Baystate Health in Springfield, MA, in the hiring of Raymond McCarthy as treasurer and chief financial officer.

Mr. McCarthy has served as interim CFO since March. “Ray has worked tirelessly and skillfully to keep our health system financially stable during the pandemic and the accompanying recession, ensuring that Baystate Health got its fair share of state and federal relief dollars and deployed its resources flexibly and effectively,” said Mark A. Keroack, president and CEO of Baystate Health.

“He has over 25 years of health care experience serving in many financial leadership capacities within Baystate Health, with growing responsibilities and earned recognition as a leader in his field,” said Dr. Keroack. “His breadth and depth of financial experience and alignment to Baystate’s values ideally position him to take the helm as senior vice president and chief financial officer.”

Mr. McCarthy will be responsible for providing system-wide vision, strategic direction and operational leadership of all aspects of finance to ensure the overall financial health of Baystate Health. He will help lead Baystate Health’s ongoing transformation from a traditional fee-for-service healthcare system to one that focuses on population health and value-based delivery solutions.

Company Veteran

In his previous role as vice president of finance for Baystate Health, and CFO of Baycare Health Partners, Mr. McCarthy was responsible for centralized financial support services, including investments, treasury services, financial reporting and accounting, accounts payable, payroll, and tax and managed care contracting. He began his career at Baystate Health in 1993 as a senior budget analyst and has served in the roles of controller for health New England and director of finance for Baystate Medical Practices as well as director of managed care and chief financial officer for both Baycare Health Partners, which is the health system’s physician hospital organization, and Baystate Medical Practices.

Mr. McCarthy led Baystate Health’s financial transition to being an accountable care organization, adopting value-based arrangements, and advancing population health approaches while continuing to provide traditional financial analysis, planning, reporting, budgeting and revenue cycle responsibilities. Mr. McCarthy’s prior experiences include the roles of director of finance at Cigna and CFO for Northeast Medical Group, part of Yale New Haven Health System.

Baystate Health is a not-for-profit integrated health system.  The system has four hospitals, over 80 medical practices and 25 reference laboratories. With 12,000 employees, including 1,600 physicians, it is one of Massachusetts’ largest employers.

Healthcare Recruiting

Furst Group, which is headquartered in Rockford, IL, partners with many of the premier healthcare organizations in the world, from providers and payers to life-science companies and private equity/venture capital firms. While Furst Group’s roots are in managed care, the firm continues to be one of the nation’s leading executive search partners to health systems, hospitals, academic medical centers, post-acute and hospice and palliative care facilities. Its work with insurers stretches back to the HMO era, yet the firm also teams with life-science, pharmaceutical and medical device companies.

Furst Group also has offices in Phoenix, AZ; Radnor, PA; San Francisco; Brentwood, TN; Chicago; Irving, TX; Minneapolis, MN; Seattle; St. Louis; and Washington, D.C.

New Pressures on CFOs

Immediate concerns around cash flow, liquidity and the bottom line are taking precedence at many companies due to continued fallout from the pandemic. But there are high-value lessons emerging from the current health and economic crisis that chief financial officers should bear in mind, according to recruiters specializing in finding talent for finance functional roles.


Executive Search Review Special Issue: Financial Services Recruiting

Hunt Scanlon Media has just released our latest special issue of ESR. This time around we take an in-depth look at the challenges financial services firms are facing in their hunt for new talent.

We cover it all: How CFOs are confronting new layers of risk in the pandemic era; the rapid and dramatic change coming at the CFO; using people analytics to acquire top talent, predict performance & reduce turnover; and why banks are turning to search firms. We even provide our latest “Financial Fifty Recruiters” ranking of financial services search firms! In this special issue of ESR, Hunt Scanlon editors take an extraordinary inside look at recruiting during these unprecedented times. Click here and enjoy.


This COVID-19 crisis has thrust CFOs into the spotlight as never before, they report, while the pandemic itself has also created a unique business environment in which CFOs are uniquely positioned to drive business value during the recovery phase, which is expected to come in 2021 and 2022.

All too many companies today are desperate to get as much cash on their balance sheets as possible in order to ride out the storm of COVID-19, say recruiters. Bottom-line pressures are forcing many businesses to shift their forecasting strategies, explore new products and services — or even expand into alternative sales and delivery channels. The best CFOs are spearheading that effort.

Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media

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