2025 Charlotteans Of The Year: Eugene Woods

Eugene Woods moved to Charlotte in April 2016, when he took over as president and CEO of what was then Carolinas HealthCare System. “This is the longest I’ve ever lived anywhere, as a matter of fact,” Woods says. The son of a Navy aeronautics mechanic, Woods was born in Rhode Island but spent much of his childhood in southern Spain, where his mother, Maria, was from. Woods, 61, has moved from city to city through a successful 34-year career in health care administration.

But his signature achievement is one of the most important developments in Charlotte history: the opening of the city’s first four-year medical school and The Pearl, the innovation district that contains it. The school and district reflect Woods’ vision of health care that’s both technologically advanced and oriented toward even the most marginalized patients and families—and the product of what he calls “applied hope.” (Through a rebranding and a merger, Carolinas HealthCare System became Atrium Health, now part of Advocate Health; Woods has remained president and CEO throughout.)

We spoke with Woods in early September. His words have been edited for length and clarity.

The Pearl itself and the medical school here in Charlotte started as a dream that I had five years ago, when we brought Wake Forest (University School of Medicine) into the family. Our dream was that Charlotte could be home to something new and truly special in health care, and that we could build a nexus, if you will, a place that can reimagine health care, and that we were at a pivot point where somebody needed to step in and really lead in that space. Charlotte was the largest city in the country without a four-year medical school, and we did not want to keep watching talented students leave for other opportunities somewhere else. We also didn’t want the latest clinical breakthroughs to occur somewhere else.

We will have the largest deployment of AI medical imaging of any organization in the entire world, and that’s already allowing us to find brain bleeds earlier. On average, it takes 20 minutes. We’re finding that we can detect brain bleeds in four to five minutes. So this is not science fiction. These are the kind of breakthroughs that we are birthing here and intend to birth here. Because here’s my core philosophy: that everyone deserves to benefit from the breakthroughs that we build.

I think applied hope is taking hopes and dreams and visions and actually making them come to fruition. That’s really what’s been our focus. This morning, for example—I sometimes go to our Instagram page to see different patient stories, and there’s one that had a patient ringing a cancer bell. Whenever anyone completes their cancer care at Levine Cancer Institute—you know, we have one of the largest cancer programs in the country—they ring a bell, and they bring family, they bring friends, they bring caregivers. They came to us with hope that they would heal and get better. I see that ringing the bell as applied hope, meaning that we were able to bring it to reality.

My philosophy is that you can blend the futuristic with the humanistic, and that’s really what this moment calls for. People talk about AI, obviously, and that’s going to transform everything that we do. But AI without humans, or humans without AI, is not going to be as good as leveraging both together. So you may have a rare heart condition in one of our most rural hospitals—we have 21 rural hospitals in Advocate Health, serving almost a million patients—and we’re using that technology to be able to bring the best care close to home. It’s really important now when rural hospitals are closing throughout the country.

Siemens Healthineers has launched its first U.S.-based Experience Center at The Pearl, allowing health care professionals to use the most advanced medical equipment.

We call ourselves a learning organization. That’s why the quote in front of The Pearl is, “This is a place where excellence lives, and excellence is learned”—and the definition of excellence continues to shift. So I think the currency of one’s past experience has a shorter shelf life these days. I’ve been doing this for 30 years, and I tell folks who I mentor in today’s environment, “That may count for only 10 years’ worth of applicable experience.” In a rapidly changing environment, the organization that learns fastest, and can implement those learnings best, is the organization that ultimately will succeed.

We have these values. We call them “commitments,” and one of the key commitments is to embrace the unknown with fearless curiosity and unshakable optimism. We live in extraordinarily challenging times. There’s a lot of uncertainty. The thing I’m most proud of is our leadership team’s mindset towards that uncertainty. There’s a saying in Stoic philosophy that it’s not what happens but how you respond that matters the most.

There is an energy (in Charlotte) that I’ve not seen in many other cities that includes how the business community actually partners with community organizations and elected officials. I think it’s that energy of wanting to be the best, wanting to experiment and try new things, that I think we’re capturing here. For me, it’s exciting also because we’re the largest provider of care not just in North Carolina but also in Wisconsin and Illinois. So we’re creating this laboratory, if you will, that extends beyond even this state, as part of Advocate Health, that is all geared, at this inflection point in health care, toward doing something new and different, because clearly what worked in the past is not going to work in the future.

This is really one of the most fulfilling, meaningful things I’ve done in my entire career. There’s a lot of complexity, but I’ve never lost my joy. I’ve never been jaded about what it is that I am privileged to do: to build things with talented teammates to impact people’s lives. That’s not just a slogan. That’s not just a platitude. That’s something that fuels me every single day.