The Cure for Pilotitis

Dr. Sarah Matt is a physician-executive, healthcare strategist, and national bestselling author who has spent 20 years inside the three rooms most healthcare leaders only ever see one of: the operating room, the enterprise boardroom, and the strategy table where technology meets clinical reality.

Dr. Matt earned her M.D. from SUNY Upstate Medical University, her B.S. in Biology from Cornell University, and her MBA from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin. Her surgery training gave her the decision-making framework she still uses today: Assess fast, commit fully, execute with discipline.

Dr. Matt has held executive roles at NextGen Healthcare, ESO, Sovato, and Oracle. At Oracle, she built out the OCI cloud business for healthcare and life sciences globally and held key roles during the $29B acquisition of Cerner.

Dr. Matt is the founder of Vital Werks and the author of “The Borderless Healthcare Revolution” (Wiley, 2025), a national bestseller that argues geography, credentials, and institutional walls are no longer legitimate barriers to care delivery. The book introduces the Five Pillars framework, now used in health system strategy sessions and care delivery redesign initiatives nationally.

Dr. Matt is an Assistant Clinical Professor at SUNY Upstate Medical University, an industry career consultant at UT Austin McCombs, and a volunteer physician at the Mary Rose Clinic in Oneida, NY, where she provides primary care to uninsured patients. She credits that clinic as the most reliable test for whether any framework she teaches actually works.

Thomas O’Toole is the Assistant Dean for Professional Education at Cornell University’s Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. With more than 20 years of experience as a successful higher education executive and public affairs educator, Dr. O’Toole collaborates with the Brooks School’s leadership on all aspects of professional degree program operations, including admissions recruitment and marketing, curriculum planning and instructional design, and performance evaluation and quality improvement for Cornell’s residential and executive professional degrees. He also led strategic academic engagement efforts for the Brooks School, including serving as lead for the school’s military student support programs through Service to Service and Service to School, spearheading government and corporate partnerships, cultivating engaged learning projects for students, and overseeing non-degree certificate development with eCornell.

In addition to his administrative portfolio, Dr. O’Toole teaches the MPA program’s core course on “Issues in Public Administration,” the EMPA program’s core course on “Public Administration: A Strategic Planning perspective,” and a seminar on “Comparative Public and Health Administration” taught across the MPA, EMPA, and EMHA programs.

Dr. O’Toole is the recipient of the 2014-2015 SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Professional Service. He earned his B.A. in International Relations Phi Beta Kappa, magna cum laude, from Bucknell University; his MPA from Cornell University; and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Government from Cornell University.