Great News! Hospital Administrators Got a 41% Pay Raise!!
Atrium Health in North Carolina released its executive report, and thank goodness, the executives received massive raises. I was so worried. Here are some numbers:
The total compensation of Atrium Health’s top executives soared by an average of 41 percent last year, according to newly released data from the hospital system, but information about the salary of Eugene Woods, CEO of Atrium parent Advocate Health, was not included in the release.
The executive compensation report from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Hospital Authority, which does business as Atrium Health, shows double-digit raises across much of Atrium’s senior leadership, with several executives seeing their compensation jump by more than 50 percent.
The four highest paid executives were:
- Ken Haynes, president of Advocate Health’s southeast region, received $5.07 million in 2024, up 56.6 percent from $3.24 million in 2023.
- Scott Rissmiller, executive vice president and chief physician executive, had compensation of $4.03 million, up 54.3 percent.
- Brett Denton, the system’s top legal officer, saw a 68.5 percent pay increase to $3.87 million.
- Carol Lovin, chief integration officer and chief of staff, earned $3.6 million, up 57.4 percent.
Even better is that Atrium is a tax-exempt nonprofit.
Under IRS rules, charitable hospitals must operate in the public interest and demonstrate a measurable community benefit in exchange for not paying taxes, but the IRS does not go into detail about what that means.
Read that last part again. No one knows or can define what constitutes a community benefit. But they sure complain about DPC docs cherry-picking or abandoning patients or charging $75 a month being too expensive.
If you are working as an employed doctor, think about these executives’ salaries when you ask for a bump in your salary and they say no. Then take a look at how wRVUs haven’t changed over the years:
After you examine these factors, read some books on how to start your own Direct Primary Care practice and prepare to leave the system!
It is truly amazing the information you find!
The gift of being retired
Eugene Woods makes music videos on the roof of the hospital. It’s on youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAbYCKcsQVs. He puts out little videos telling us how good the organization is doing. I refuse to watch them. When advocate and atrium merged, they changed our incentive pay from $40 to $10. In January, we get a PPI bonus, it’s basically 50 cents for every hour your worked in 2025. So about $800 if you worked all year.
Yet, he is making what nearly 300 nurses make. With a salary that doubled from $9M to $17M in 2023 and now soaring to $26M. I am sure he works very hard, but does he really work 300 times harder than an average paid nurse?
And don’t get me started on the gouging going on in the facility. The overpriced food, the overpriced merchandise. It’s all a cash grab. Eugene Woods is just another heartless, self-indulgent CEO of a TAX EXEPMT organization that really only cares about its top people. There is no compassion here, just profits. They don’t care about the people, just their portfolios. It’s nothing more than a smiling facade.