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How an academic system nearly tripled its revenue in 5 years

Morgantown, W.Va.-based WVU Medicine is growing at a rapid clip and has nearly tripled its annual revenue over the last five years. 

The academic system's annual revenue is close to $7 billion in 2024, up from about $2.8 billion in 2019, according to financial documents obtained by Becker's. WVU has grown significantly through hospital acquisitions during this period, adding 12 new campuses, with a 13th hospital acquisition — the 238-bed Weirton (W.Va.) Medical Center — expected to be completed Jan. 1. 

"We've grown very quickly. We've almost tripled our size from a revenue perspective," CFO Nick Barcellona said on the Becker's Healthcare podcast. "A key part of our strategy [for 2025] is really thinking about breadth and depth across our provider network and really shifting the mindset there from integration to optimization."

WVU Medicine, which currently operates 26 hospitals across West Virginia, Ohio, Maryland and Pennsylvania, has been focused on finalizing several hospital acquisitions in 2024, but is shifting its focus to integrating hospitals and providers under its unified Epic EHR and IT systems and ensuring alignment from both a clinical and care perspective. 

"We're not going in and really changing anything from a care perspective. We give a lot of autonomy to our local business units, but all these administrative functions, we want to make sure that we're optimizing them now," Mr. Barcellona said. "We've spent all this money and gone through all the fighting fires of integration. Now, how can we then optimize that? Because that's where everybody gets better. That's why folks wanna join a system, and that's how a system gets from where they are to where they need to be in the future to be successful."

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