Corewell Health CEO Tina Freese Decker on making a merger successful

National Harbor, Md. - Tina Freese Decker says it has taken a great deal of work, but she’s happy to see the way Corewell Health is operating today.

Freese Decker, the president and CEO of Corewell Health, said there are a number of factors involved.

In 2022, two Michigan health systems - Spectrum Health and Beaumont Health - merged to form a new system, which took the new identity Corewell Health. The system operates 21 hospitals and employs more than 60,000 workers, and Corewell reported $17.6 billion in revenue in 2025.

In an interview with Chief Healthcare Executive® at the Healthcare Financial Management Association conference, Freese Decker talked about the keys of the successful integration of the systems.

She also discussed some of the financial challenges ahead for the healthcare industry and how Corewell Health aims to tackle them.

“I'm really pleased with the progress that we have made with Corewell Health,” she says. “We've seen our quality continue to increase every year, which is phenomenal, and our culture coming together. People are really excited about what they're doing, and that's what I love to see. The basis for the reason why we did this, to improve quality across the state, is coming to fruition.”

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Coming together

Freese Decker has been president and CEO of Corewell since the merger took place more than four years ago. She began serving as president and CEO of Spectrum Health in 2018.

When Spectrum and Beaumont initially came together, Freese Decker says the newly merged system’s leadership stuck to a few core principles.

“We said we had to be really clear about our values, our mission, and the operating model, because that would be our guiding light and help us as we did all the integration work over the next three years, and so that was really strong,” Freese Decker says. “We spent a lot of time over-communicating and over-listening, so one of the first things I did was another survey and asked for feedback about the culture.”

She says she also sought feedback in the survey about the brand for the merged organization, and one of the survey’s respondents suggested the name “Corewell,” which ended up as the system’s new identity. She says the requests for suggestions of a new name for the system ended up being a good way to engage the staff.

Freese Decker stresses the importance of deliberating carefully, but then moving forward once a decision has been made.

“There's so many decisions that you have to make, and you could always second-guess yourself,” she says. “But it was really important that we make the decisions, and we move on, at least live with it for six months, so that we could put things in place, and then we moved fast with everything that we were doing.”

Freese Decker says a key step in getting Corewell operating as a single organization was getting everyone on the same version of Epic’s electronic health record system. Both Beaumont and Spectrum had been using Epic, but they weren’t on the same version.

When Corewell began operating on the same platform, Freese Decker says that was a turning point.

“That's when I really felt that we were starting to click, and so it was about three years in, because you have to really build that foundation to get it to a good spot,” she says. “But now I see people coming from all across the system with innovative ideas, highlighting them, sharing best practices back and forth, and it's more of a fluid way to have that conversation.”

Corewell recently had an all-management meeting, inviting supervisors, managers, directors and vice presidents to come together.

“We had over 2,200 people in the room where we're talking about our mission and our values and our strategic relationship and what each of us needed to do to enable us to achieve our goals and the mission and vision of the organization,” Freese Decker says.

“And that was exhilarating and energizing all at the same time to get us aligned with that direction and help support all of those leaders, so that we can go out and support every one of our team members in the organization, provide the very best health care and coverage to our communities.”

Navigating headwinds

Corewell Health enjoyed strong financial performance in 2025, with $1.3 billion in net income. Freese Decker points out that the health system was buoyed by good investment returns last year.

But like all health systems, Corewell is dealing with rising costs and the prospect of cuts in Medicaid that are unfolding over the next decade. Medicaid spending is projected to drop by about $1 trillion over the next 10 years, and millions are projected to lose Medicaid coverage.

“I think the main point for us is to focus on the problem to be solved, and identify what we can do to serve our mission and our vision, and be laser-focused on that strategy. And that makes us create different scenarios of how we put our plans in place, but really strong sustainable plans that, as we execute those, and execute them well, they will help us be successful,” she says.

Freese Decker acknowledges the challenges ahead.

“The financial headwinds are tough right now, and I think that to be really good stewards of your organization and the margin that you have,” she says. “And to be able to reinvest into your communities, you have to make difficult decisions, and that means identifying clearly what you're going to do and what you're not going to do, and how you're going to drive forward.”

She points to the value of forming new partnerships. Last year, Corewell announced a partnership with Quest Diagnostics to enter into a joint venture on laboratory services.

The joint venture, Diagnostic Lab of Michigan, will be based at a new laboratory facility being built at the Corewell Health Southfield Center in Southfield, Michigan. The new lab facility is expected to be operational next year.

“We identified an opportunity to increase access and affordability for our patients in a different way,” she says. “We knew that as a healthcare system we weren't the best at lab. We knew Quest was better than us.”

By partnering with Quest, Freese Decker says the system can deliver a better product for consumers and patients.

And she says Corewell is looking to think differently in an environment when cost pressures are likely to grow.

“There's a lot of different ways that we're thinking about things to address the financial headwinds, to address the uncertainty that's out there and to make sure that we are sustainable and continue to be high quality,” she says.