Business POV

Former Accenture-ite Mary Ann Tolan is the founder and chief executive officer of Accretive Health, a leading end-to-end revenue cycle service company for healthcare providers. Here she talks about getting the most out of employees via goal-setting.

Tolan was speaking as part of the 55th Annual Management Conference at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. The event was held May 18 at the Gleacher Center. She served on a panel with William McComb, CEO of Liz Claiborne.

Tolan leads a team of seasoned industry professionals focused on revolutionizing patient access and revenue cycle processes for healthcare providers. Accretive Health offers healthcare providers a full-accountability managed service to close significant financial leakage, accelerate cash collections and balance sheet strength. The company focuses on improving the financial strength of healthcare providers to support their excellence in healthcare delivery.

Prior to assuming her current role, Tolan was a senior executive and officer at Accenture, the $16 billion global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company. Tolan served as Accenture’s Corporate Development Officer, where she focused on new businesses for Accenture, exploring both organic growth and acquisition opportunities and helping identify ways for Accenture to increase further its share of the growing business process outsourcing market.

Prior to assuming the Corporate Development Officer role, Ms. Tolan was Group Chief Executive of Accenture’s $2.3 billion Resources operating group. In this role, she led a team of 11,000 professionals globally. In this capacity she launched and grew the fastest growing BPO business within Accenture. She also played a leadership role in taking Accenture public in 2001, one of the largest offerings on the NYSE that year.

Before serving as Group Chief Executive of Accenture’s Resources operating group, Ms. Tolan was managing partner of Growth & Strategy. As the Chief Strategist for Accenture, she was one of the key designers of the company’s reinvention agenda.

She is a director of the Best Buy Corporation, serves on the council for the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago, and on the board of the Lyric Opera.

Ms. Tolan received a bachelor of business administration degree from Loyola University and a master of business administration from the University of Chicago.