ATRIUM'S SECOND CITY ADVANCE.

• Position: NC TREND: Statewide

Charlotte-based Atrium Health CEO Eugene Woods made good on his goal of creating one of the nation's largest hospital companies, inking a partnership with Advocate Aurora Health, which mainly operates in Wisconsin and Illinois.

No money is changing hands, and the two not-for-profit systems will retain their brands in local markets and remain responsible for their debt. But the headquarters will be in Charlotte, though Advocate Aurora is larger and is the dominant hospital system in Chicago, the third-largest U.S. metro area. Woods will be co-CEO for 18 months, while Atrium Health Chair Ed Brown will lead the combined board.

Pending federal regulatory approval, the combined system, to be called Advocate Health, will have annual revenue topping $27 billion.

The transaction marks one of the biggest MSA. deals in North Carolina since the bank consolidation era of the 1990s and 2000s, when Bank of America and Wachovia built up two leading U.S. banks. The combined systems would rank fifth in the U.S. hospital industry, bolstering Atrium's efforts to make the Queen City and Winston-Salem national leaders in health care innovation.

Atrium's board hired Woods in 2016. He oversaw acquisitions in Macon and Rome, Georgia and formed a partnership with Winston-Salem-based Wake Forest Baptist Health. But a proposed merger with Chapel Hill-based UNC Health fell through, and Wilmington-based New Hanover Regional Medical Center agreed to sell to Novant Health of Winston-Salem, bypassing Atrium.

Those were smaller opportunities than Advocate Aurora, which had annual revenue of $14 billion and net income of $1.3 billion last year. Atrium has about $13 billion in annual revenue. It hasn't disclosed its net income for 2021.

"This strategic combination will enable us to deepen our commitments to health equity, create more jobs and opportunities for our teammates and communities, launch new, game-changing innovations, and so much more," Woods said in a news release. Woods will be co-CEO for 18 months with Advocate Aurora's Jim...