Penn Medicine reported a $247 million operating profit for the year that ended June 30

The University of Pennsylvania Health System had a $247 million operating profit in the year ended June 30, the nonprofit told bond investors Friday.

The system’s 2.1% operating margin was about the same as the year before, excluding last year’s unusual gain from a federal drug settlement. An overall increase in expenses has reduced margins throughout healthcare industry since the coronavirus pandemic.

Penn’s target for the fiscal year that started July 1 is a 2.4% operating margin, with the longer-term goal of climbing back to 4%, the system’s chief financial officer Julia Puchtler said in an interview Friday.

That level of profit allows the health system to transfer about $200 million a year to Penn’s medical school for education and research — which it has continued doing despite lower profitability — and to invest in growth, Puchtler said.

Here are details on Penn’s fiscal 2025 financial results:

Revenue: The health system reported nearly $12 billion in revenue. That total increased 10% from $10.9 billion in fiscal 2024. A small part of the growth came from the acquisition of Doylestown Health at the beginning of April. That deal added about $120 million in revenue and the same amount of expenses in the three months that ended June 30, Puchtler said.

Expenses: The amount Penn spent on supplies and services jumped 16.6% last year. Some of that increase is from growth in chemotherapy for cancer patients, CAR-T treatments, and bone marrow transplants, Puchtler said. These are high-cost programs, but “there’s offset in the revenue to cover that, so it’s good growth,” she said.

Robotic surgery is a counterexample. It is increasingly common because it results in better outcomes for patients, Puchtler said, but doesn’t generate more revenue to offset that added cost.

Noteworthy: Penn’s cash reserves were enough to cover 186 days of expenses at the end of June without any new revenue. That was down from more than 190 a year ago, partly because of the Doylestown acquisition, according to Standard & Poor’s, a credit-rating agency. Puchtler said part of the proceeds from a $300 million bond sale in July added a few days of cash.

Then in August, to add to its liquidity of more than $1 billion during a financially challenging time for the healthcare industry, Penn secured $300 million in short-term borrowings. That issuance of so-called commercial paper received S&P’s highest credit rating for that kind of debt, according to the ratings agency’s Aug. 19 report.