Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic CEO James Woodward will retire in January

Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic CEO James L. Woodward will retire in January, the health system said Friday.

Woodward came to the Philadelphia region in 2016 as CEO of St. Mary Medical Center in Langhorne. Two years later, he became CEO of a five-hospital group put together by their common owner, Trinity Health, of Livonia, Mich., which called it Trinity Health Mid-Atlantic.

The hospitals in that group were St. Mary, Nazareth in Northeast Philadelphia, Mercy Fitzgerald in Darby, Mercy Philadelphia in West Philadelphia, and St. Francis in Wilmington. Trinity had planned to close Mercy Philadelphia in 2020, but it was kept open in a modified form by the University of Pennsylvania Health System.

Trinity Health, one of the nation’s largest Catholic hospital systems, had $1.1 billion in revenue from its nonprofit Philadelphia-area hospitals in the year that ended June 30, 2023, down from $2.2 billion in fiscal 2018, according to audited financial statements.

One reason for the decline was the sale of Lourdes Health System in South Jersey to Virtua Health in 2019. Lourdes had $542 million in revenue in the final year of Trinity’s ownership. Trinity sold St. Francis Medical Center in Trenton in 2022 to Capital Health, which closed it.

Woodward’s retirement was previously reported by Becker’s Hospital Review.