From Trinity Health’s Expansion to Its Financial Decline: The Legacy of James L. Woodward.

James L. Woodward, CEO of Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic, announced his retirement in January. Woodward joined the Philadelphia region in 2016 as CEO of St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne and later became the CEO of a five-hospital group formed by their common owner, Trinity Health, based in Livonia, Michigan. The group included hospitals such as St. Mary, Nazareth, Mercy Fitzgerald, Mercy Philadelphia, and St. Francis.

In 2020, Trinity Health had originally planned to close Mercy Philadelphia but was kept open in a modified form by the University of Pennsylvania Health System. Trinity Health is known to be one of the nation’s largest Catholic hospital systems and reported $1.1 billion in revenue from its nonprofit, Philadelphia-area hospitals for the fiscal year ending June 30, 2023. This was a decrease from $2.2 billion in revenue reported for fiscal 2018 according to audited financial statements.

One reason for this decline in revenue was due to the sale of Lourdes Health System in South Jersey to Virtua Health in 2019 which reported $542 million in revenue during Trinity’s ownership period. Additionally, Trinity also sold St Francis Medical Center in Trenton to Capital Health which later closed the facility. Becker’s Hospital Review had previously reported on Woodward’s upcoming retirement plans earlier this year