Trinity Health Leadership

Over a career spanning 37 years, Joseph R. Swedish has built a legacy of dynamic leadership and service excellence. Since becoming President and CEO of Trinity Health in January 2005, Mr. Swedish has focused his leadership on the transformation of health care delivery through improved clinical and business processes and expanding access to the growing population of underinsured patients.

As a Unified Enterprise Ministry® Mr. Swedish leads Trinity Health, the nation’s eleventh largest health system and fourth-largest Catholic health system, by leveraging scale and skill to create efficient and effective care delivery. Under his leadership Trinity Health has accelerated its performance financially and operationally as the result of strategic and tactical initiatives focused on eight imperatives: community benefit ministry, patient care excellence, financial stewardship, best people, physician alignment, growth ambulatory health networks, and innovation having received the National Committee for Quality Health Care 2004 Award and recognized by Thompson Reuter in 2009 as the nation’s Top 10 Health System performer for quality care.

Mr. Swedish has diverse senior executive operations experiences in both investor owned and non-profit health care systems that spans faith based and secular health care, university and community based academic medical centers, integrated delivery systems and regional rural referral hospitals in the mid-Atlantic states, Florida, Colorado and now eight states that encompass Trinity Health’s markets.

Prior to joining Trinity Health, Mr. Swedish was President and CEO of Centura Health, the largest health care provider in Colorado with twelve hospitals that combined the operations of Catholic and Seven Day Adventist hospitals. The faith-based system won both national and international awards for excellence in patient care and for the successful incorporation of spirituality into the health care workplace. He served for five years as President of the East Florida and Central Florida Divisions for the Hospital Corporation of America from 1994 to 1998.

He currently serves as a member of the National Quality Forum Board, Catholic Health Association Board of Trustees, the National Center of Healthcare Leadership Board, and the Coventry Health Care Board of Directors.

He has served as past Chairman of the American Hospital Association’s Institute for Diversity in Health Management, as a member of the Special Advisory Group on Improving Hospital Care for Minorities; and the Nonprofit System CEO group examining health care tax-exempt status. He has also served as a member of its Long Range Policy Committee and the Ad Hoc Committee on Payment for Health Services, and as a member of the AHA Regional Policy Board – Region 8. In 1999, he was elected Chairman of the Colorado Hospital Association Board of Directors.

Mr. Swedish has appeared in Modern Healthcare’s “Top 100 Most Powerful Leaders in Healthcare” every year since 2006. In 2009, he was honored with the CEO Diversity Leadership Award from Diversity Best Practices. He’s been recognized with the University Medal by the Board of Regents for the University of Colorado, the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Rocky Mountain Region and was the 2004 Career Achievement Regent’s Award from the American College of Healthcare Executives.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a master’s degree in health administration from Duke University.