North Texas Healthcare Compensation: Who’s On Top?

North Texas is home to some of the largest healthcare organizations in the country, accompanying explosive population growth. Competitive salaries are necessary to attract top talent to lead these organizations and ensure they stay on top.

D CEO Healthcare dove into recent SEC filings and IRS forms, which list compensation for public and nonprofit organizations, respectively, to see how local healthcare leaders are being compensated and what we can learn about their leadership.

We found the available recent compensation data for McKesson Corp., Tenet Healthcare, AMN Healthcare, Baylor Scott & White Health, Texas Health Resources, Methodist Health System, Children’s Health, Cook Children’s Health Care System, and UT Southwestern Medical Center to see what we could learn from the individuals leading our health industry. Our list includes the top two earners from each organization in recent IRS and SEC filings.

McKesson is the region’s top company on the Fortune 500 list after ExxonMobil’s departure to Houston, and Tenet Healthcare also makes the list and is the next largest healthcare employer on the list with more than 100,000 employees, 52 hospitals, and hundreds of other outpatient sites.

In a tally of those organizations’ top earners, three of 18 were women, and two Asian leaders were the only nonwhite executives on the list. Of the highest earners, only one of the top 15 in D CEO Healthcare’s list is a woman.

The highest compensated individuals were Tenet Healthcare CEO Saum Sutaria and McKesson CEO Brian Tyler, whose total compensation for a recent filing was $18,518,109 and 16,960,596, respectively. The Tenet leader made more than his counterpart at McKesson despite Tenet’s 2023 EBITDA of $3.4 billion totaling less than McKesson’s 2023 EBITDA of $4.38 billion.

In the nonprofit world, available IRS Form 990 filings were a bit older, as the 2023 filing presenting executive compensation for fiscal year 2022. ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer reveals some interesting trends. CHRISTUS Health stands out as a system that compensates its executives relatively better than others. CHRISTUS’s 2022 revenue was $1.04 billion, compared to $1.23 billion for Baylor Scott & White Health and $1.11 Billion for Texas Health Resources. But CHRISTUS CEO Ernie Sadau earned more than $11 million in compensation in the most recent IRS filing, while the CEOs of Baylor Scott & White Health and Texas Health Resources earned significantly less.

CHRISTUS runs 63 hospitals in the U.S., Mexico, Colombia, and Chile and employs 45,000 associates. Baylor Scott & White Health runs 51 hospitals across Texas and has more than 49,000 employees, while Texas Health Resources runs 29 hospitals in North Texas and employs 29,000 people.

Following the CHRISTUS CEO, former Baylor Scott & White Health CEO Jim Hinton was the North Texas nonprofit hospital compensation leader, with total compensation exceeding $7.1 million for the most recent filing year. All other nonprofit health system CEOs were compensated less than CHRISTUS COO Jeffrey Puckett. The second top earner in Baylor’s 2022 filing was Peter McCanna, who began the year as President and finished it as CEO and earned $3.6 million in total compensation in 2022.

Total compensation topped $3 million for the CEOs of Texas Health Resources, Children’s Health (fiscal year 2021), and Methodist Health System, according to available IRS filings.

According to consulting firm SullivanCotter’s annual report on executive compensation, healthcare executives received a 4.1 percent increase in compensation on average in 2023, down from 4.3 percent in 2022, Chief Healthcare Executive reported. The median salary increase between 2022 and 2023 for hospital and health system executives was 4.8 percent. Total cash compensation, which includes bonuses, was up 3.5 percent for healthcare executives in 2023.

This list, of course, is far from exhaustive. There are likely healthcare executives at private companies who are better compensated than the leaders below.

See the full list below.

Author

Will Maddox

View Profile

Will is the senior writer for D CEO magazine and the editor of D CEO Healthcare. He's written about healthcare…