Grady Splits Its Top Job as the South Fulton Campus Starts

Grady Health System named Anthony Saul as its next CEO and kept John Haupert on through 2027 to guide a South Fulton campus. Saul, already president and chief operating officer, takes the full chief executive post on January 1, 2027. Haupert has led the safety-net system since 2011 and will step down from that title at the end of 2026.

The board announced both moves on March 18, 2026, the same day Fulton County commissioners unanimously backed county bond money for the Union City project. The emergency department on that site is already open. The hospital is not.

Grady Splits the Top Job Around a New Campus

Haupert did not frame the change as a quiet fade-out. Speaking after the county vote, he said the new campus is why the top job has to move. “This was of course my decision, and it’s time with the whole new campus of Grady. The evolution needs to be hand in hand with a new senior leader,” he said.

That is the design. Saul runs day-to-day operations now and will hold both the president and CEO titles in January. Haupert stays in an advisory seat through 2027 with two assigned tasks: strategic guidance on the South Fulton medical campus, and philanthropic and capital fundraising. Larry Gellerstedt, chair of the Grady Memorial Hospital Corporation board, put the bet on continuity rather than a national search.

As Grady prepares for the future, Anthony is the right leader at the right time. He understands the complexity of our mission, the importance of operational excellence, and the responsibility we have to the communities we serve.

Larry Gellerstedt, Chair, Grady Memorial Hospital Corporation Board

Grady was founded in 1892. It is Atlanta’s only Level I trauma center and the city’s 911 ambulance provider. The system says more than 2,000 patients rely on it each day, with about 155,000 emergency visits a year downtown. The South Fulton build is how the board wants to take pressure off that campus and put beds closer to a part of the county that lost hospital care in 2022.

What Fulton County Funded on March 18

Commissioners voted that Wednesday to advance Fulton County’s share of a campus Grady described as a more than $1 billion medical campus. The package includes $300 million in county bonds. Grady said the rest will come from its own financing and a multi-year donor campaign. In figures the system gave commissioners, the parts add to just over $1 billion.

THE SOUTH FULTON BUILD-OUT

Fulton County Commission Chairman Robb Pitts called South Fulton both a fast-growing community and a recognized health care desert. “For the people of South Fulton, improved access to health care is not a luxury, it is a necessity,” he said. “Closing this gap will save lives.” Wellstar Health System shut Atlanta Medical Center and Atlanta Medical Center South in 2022, and residents have been driving toward downtown or other counties for emergency care since.

Commissioners also amended the resolution so clinical operations at the new hospital must include residents, fellows, and trainees from Morehouse School of Medicine. Saul, already in the president’s chair that afternoon, said Grady welcomed talks on “the right rotation of residents and fellows at the South Fulton campus.”

The Operator Who Built Correll Pavilion

Saul is a finance executive the board has been promoting in public for two years. He holds an MBA from the University of Memphis and a bachelor’s degree in finance and accounting from Nicholls State University in Louisiana. He is a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives. Before Grady, he held a dual post at LCMC Health in New Orleans as vice president of finance for the system and chief financial officer of one of its hospitals.

He joined Grady more than seven years before the CEO announcement, served as senior vice president of finance, and became chief financial officer in 2021. On March 19, 2024, Haupert promoted him to senior executive vice president and chief operating officer while he kept the finance brief. In that stretch he handled fiscal management of more than $400 million in capital work, including the $237 million Correll Pavilion, Grady’s outpatient building, which opened in 2023.

Haupert said then that the COO title would put Saul “alongside our care teams.” Saul’s own line was narrower: keep expanding access and keep the care patient-centered. After the March 2026 vote he talked about the desert in personal terms. “Growing up in a small-town Louisiana, we had access to care challenges as well. Our nearest hospital was an hour away, so I saw firsthand early on that access is important,” he said. “Ensuring that we enhance access, that we increase the service to the community and we part of the healthcare solutions is my goal for Grady.”

On July 9, 2026, the Georgia Hospital Association elected him an at-large trustee. Caylee Noggle, GHA’s president and CEO, cited his operations record and his seat at a safety-net system. That is the resume the Grady board is buying: a builder of buildings and budgets, not a celebrity clinician hired from outside.

Fifteen Years After a Near Shutdown

Haupert arrived in 2011 from Parkland Health and Hospital System in Dallas, where he had been chief operating officer since 2006. His management career started in 1992 at Methodist Health System in Dallas. He later served as chair of the AHA Board of Trustees in 2023. Rick Pollack, the American Hospital Association’s president and CEO, called him “a bold and visionary leader whose tenacious commitment to improvements in patient care and expanded access has left Grady Health System, the city of Atlanta and our entire country better off.”

The local record is blunter. Grady nearly closed in 2007. When Haupert took over, the system recorded a $27 million net loss in 2011. Becker’s Hospital Review later reported that Grady operated in the black every year beginning in 2012 after a rebuild of billing, collections, and electronic records. Haupert has said the system delivers hundreds of millions of dollars a year in uncompensated care and that private gifts since the late 2000s paid for a new emergency department, more operating rooms, and stroke, trauma, and burn centers downtown.

THE HAUPERT YEARS

1. 2007: Grady comes close to shutting down before a new nonprofit board and a large Woodruff Foundation grant stabilize the hospital.
2. 2011: Haupert becomes president and CEO; the system posts a $27 million net loss.
3. 2012: Grady operates in the black, the first of a run of profitable years after the revenue-cycle rebuild.
4. March 19, 2024: Saul, then CFO, adds the chief operating officer title.
5. March 18, 2026: The board names Saul the next CEO and Fulton County backs the South Fulton campus.
6. June 2, 2026: The Union City emergency department opens to patients.
7. January 1, 2027: Saul becomes president and CEO; Haupert shifts to the campus and fundraising brief through 2027.

Those 15 years turned a rescue job into a growth job. The open question is whether a CFO-trained operator can keep the mission intact while the system borrows, builds, and asks Atlanta’s foundations for the rest of a billion-dollar campus.

Union City Already Has a 24-Hour ER

The first physical proof of the plan is not a rendering. On June 2, 2026, Grady South Emergency Department opened at 5500 Campbellton Fairburn Road. A ribbon-cutting had been held May 11. The building is 20,000 square feet and runs 24 hours a day. Saul told local reporters before opening that the community would come “in droves” and that Grady planned to serve nearly 30,000 visits a year, close to capacity in the first month.

INSIDE THE UNION CITY ER

• Scale: 20,000 square feet with 16 exam rooms, triage, observation, and a resuscitation area.
• Diagnostics: On-site X-ray, CT, ultrasound, a laboratory, and a pharmacy.
• Transfer gear: EMS bays and a helipad for patients who need downtown’s Level I trauma center.
• Staffing: Board-certified physicians, nurses, and other clinicians, including pediatric care.

Dr. Sulieman Wazeerud-Din, the department’s medical director, described the distance problem in plain terms.

We know that there are true emergencies that are time sensitive. Having an emergency department that’s 40 minutes away is really troubling. So now to bring it into your backyard and to get healthcare for all is really something special.

Dr. Sulieman Wazeerud-Din, Medical Director, Grady South Emergency Department

The ER is a freestanding department, not a trauma center. Serious cases still move to Grady Memorial. Saul has said the south-side volume should also protect the downtown trauma center by peeling off visits that do not need that campus. The office building is still dated to early 2028. The 200-bed hospital is still dated to 2031. Four months of an open ER do not finish a campus, but they do mean Saul will inherit a live facility, not only a slide deck, when the CEO title moves.

Children’s Healthcare Finished Its Handoff in August

Grady’s succession sat inside a wider Atlanta hospital turnover. On March 5, 2026, Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta said CEO Donna Hyland would retire after a 40-year tenure at Children’s, including 18 years as chief executive. The board named Dr. Patrick Frias, then co-president and CEO of Rady Children’s Health in Southern California and a former Children’s cardiologist and chief operating officer, as her successor. Frias took the CEO post on August 31, 2026. Children’s reports more than 1.2 million patient visits a year and more than 3,000 patients a day.

The two systems already share work. Children’s runs Hughes Spalding as an affiliate on Grady’s campus, and the South Fulton office building is slated for a full pediatric floor run by Children’s. The overlapping Children’s Healthcare leadership change is the cleaner of the two handoffs: Frias is already in the chair. Grady is still in the overlap window, with a sitting CEO, a named successor running operations, and a former CEO-in-waiting assigned to raise money.

Public argument around Grady this year attached to the desert and the bonds, not to Saul’s résumé. The board treated the corner office as an operations problem and spent its political capital on Fulton County. That leaves the harder residue with Haupert’s 2027 brief. Grady still has to finance the share of the campus that county bonds do not cover, and it has to do that while federal hospital funding stays unsettled, a pressure the system itself flagged in the March 18 release.

Saul becomes CEO on January 1, 2027. The Union City hospital is scheduled to open in 2031, and Haupert’s campus and fundraising assignment runs through next year.