St. Joseph’s Health Hospital ran 15,472 operating-room surgeries in 2024, and inside that number is the bet that the 451-bed Trinity Health affiliate is making heading into 2026: pull more of the region’s lung-cancer caseload out of Syracuse city-center hospitals, route it through a new Buffalo-anchored thoracic surgery line, and feed it from a thickening web of suburban primary care offices on the Liverpool side of Onondaga Lake.
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The cancer push, the suburban primary-care buildup, and a flu-season capacity scramble that forced 28 extra beds open this winter are the three stories defining St. Joseph’s 2026. They are why the system is now the most active capital-deployment story in Central New York healthcare, in a year where the long-watched Crouse-Upstate merger remains where it was left in February 2023: scrapped after Federal Trade Commission opposition.
What’s happening
On September 24, 2025, the Roswell Park Care Network announced the addition of a thoracic surgery program at St. Joseph’s Health in Syracuse, part of a five-physician hiring wave across the network. The Syracuse hires include two thoracic surgeons, David Wormuth, MD, MPH, FACS, and Michael Parish, MD, plus medical oncologist Najam ud Din, MBBS.
The program is the most concrete output yet of an affiliation that has been in place since 2023, when St. Joseph’s joined the Roswell Park Care Network as a member institution. Roswell Park, headquartered in Buffalo, is the only National Cancer Institute-designated comprehensive cancer center in Upstate New York. For St. Joseph’s, the affiliation supplies a credential that no other Syracuse hospital carries.
The strategic logic: capture chest and lung surgery volume that has historically traveled to Buffalo or to one of the two big city-center Syracuse hospitals. Wormuth has operated in Central New York since 2002. Parish completed a minimally invasive thoracic surgery fellowship at Roswell Park in 2019. Both now hold Roswell Park academic appointments inside one Trinity Health hospital.
By the numbers
The size of the bet is set by the size of the franchise. The numbers below are pulled from the In Good Health hospital profile, which compiles the most recent system-reported figures, plus the Trinity Health parent disclosure.
St. Joseph’s Health Syracuse, the headline numbers. Beds, employees and 2024 patient volume per In Good Health system profile. Revenue per Zippia aggregate estimate; the system’s audited 2024 990 reports the official figure.
The volume picture: 17,977 inpatient discharges in 2024, 54,053 emergency department visits, 724,035 outpatient visits and 15,472 operating-room surgeries. The ED count is below the 70,000-visits figure St. Joseph’s used in older marketing material and below the surge volumes seen in pre-pandemic years, a multi-year softening that mirrors the national pattern of ED throughput dropping as urgent-care and telehealth absorb low-acuity cases.
The parent footprint is what carries the weight. St. Joseph’s is one of 115,000 colleagues and roughly 26,000 physicians and clinicians inside Trinity Health, the Livonia, Michigan-based Catholic health system that operates across 25 states. That scale is what underwrites a sub-scale upstate hospital being able to attach itself to a Buffalo cancer center and stand up a thoracic line in under three years from affiliation to first surgeon hire.
How St. Joseph’s stacks up against the two Syracuse city-center giants
The bed-count gap inside the Syracuse metro is the single most important number for understanding strategy across all three hospitals. Upstate is the regional anchor by a wide margin, Crouse is the independent specialty system, and St. Joseph’s sits in the middle with a Catholic-system parent.
The economic-impact gap is even wider. SUNY Upstate Medical University reported $3.2 billion in fiscal year 2024 economic impact statewide, with 12,788 direct jobs as of July 2025. St. Joseph’s combined revenue and employment line is roughly one order of magnitude smaller. The implication for the cancer strategy: Upstate has the volume to absorb its own subspecialty programs natively. St. Joseph’s needs an external partner with brand authority. Roswell Park is that partner.
The Buffalo connection, and what gets built next
Roswell Park’s Syracuse push traces back several years. St. Joseph’s became a Care Network member in 2023, joining a roster that operates across New York and Northwest Pennsylvania. The Syracuse hires sit alongside two additional Care Network appointments announced the same day: medical oncologist Maksim Liaukovich, MD, joined Samaritan Health in Watertown, and pulmonologist Edward Ventresca, MD, FCCP, FCP, FAASM, joined Amherst. Four upstate Network nodes outside Buffalo is how Roswell Park is now scaling.
What it means for patients in Liverpool
The Syracuse main campus, at 301 Prospect Ave. on the Near Northside, is not where most St. Joseph’s patients actually touch the system. The volume is in the suburban primary-care offices and the specialty satellites. Liverpool is the dense one.
The 5100 West Taft Road campus inside the town of Salina hosts St. Joseph’s Health Cardiovascular Institute, Liverpool, in Suite 2T, and Primary Care Center Liverpool in the same building. The address sits a quarter mile off Oswego Road, three miles from the heart of the Liverpool village business district and roughly seven miles from the Prospect Avenue hospital.
For a Liverpool resident newly diagnosed with a lung mass, the workflow now goes: primary care visit on West Taft, referral to thoracic surgery at the main campus on Prospect, surgery performed under the Roswell Park academic umbrella, and follow-up imaging back at the Liverpool satellite. None of that requires a drive to Buffalo. The drive distance saved against the alternative of routing every chest case to Roswell Park’s Elm Street campus is roughly 150 miles each way.
The Liverpool hub matters beyond cancer. Family Care Medical Group at 308 West Seneca Street in Manlius, the St. Joseph’s Physicians Primary Care office at 5301 West Genesee Street in Camillus, and the West Taft Road location form a suburban triangle around the city. Liverpool is the largest of the three, with the town of Salina counting roughly 32,000 residents.
Workforce and jobs
The 3,391 employees at St. Joseph’s are part of a larger Trinity Health New York region structure. Steven Hanks, MD, MMM, FACP, FFSMB, became President and CEO of Trinity Health New York Region, covering both St. Joseph’s Health and the Albany-based St. Peter’s Health Partners, on January 1, 2023. The regional consolidation collapsed two prior president roles into one and is the structure under which the thoracic line was negotiated.
The St. Joseph’s executive bench, per the system leadership page, includes Meredith Price as President of Hospital Operations, Amine Hila, MD, as Chief Medical Officer for Acute Care and Chief Clinical Officer for Trinity Health New York, Robert Carlin, MD, as Chief Medical Officer for Ambulatory Services, Julie Edmunds Smith as Chief Financial Officer, and Julie Moore as Chief Nursing Officer. Mark Murphy holds the Chief Strategy Officer title that links operations back to Trinity Health corporate.
The hiring pipeline question carries the most policy weight. Central New York is short on registered nurses, respiratory therapists, and specialty technicians that staff a thoracic operating room. The Micron semiconductor build out in Clay has already pulled labor pricing upward across skilled trades and is starting to do the same for hospital support roles. St. Joseph’s is competing for the same hourly worker who could take a higher-wage Micron-adjacent job.
The flu surge that forced 28 beds open
The 2025 to 2026 flu season produced the operational story that defined the winter. From October 2025 through May 2026, St. Joseph’s recorded 366 emergency department positive flu tests and 108 flu-related admissions. From December 2025 through May 2026 alone the system recorded 297 ED positives and 99 admissions.
St. Joseph’s activated its Incident Command System and opened 28 additional beds to handle the influx. That 28-bed surge is a meaningful 6.2 percent expansion off the 451-bed baseline, executed inside existing physical plant. The fact that the system held the activation open through May, not just through the late-January peak, is the signal that the flu wave was wider and longer than the 2023-2024 or 2024-2025 seasons.
The flu pressure overlaps directly with the cancer strategy. Operating-room throughput in a 451-bed hospital is a fixed resource. Every elective oncology case competes for room time, recovery beds and intensive-care capacity against medicine admissions from a flu spike. A long respiratory season defers elective surgical volume and the revenue with it. The thoracic line is betting on a quieter 2026-2027.
Competitor and market context
St. Joseph’s strategy plays out against three Syracuse-area competitors and one structural national fact.
The first competitor is Upstate University Hospital, the 700-bed teaching hospital across town. Upstate runs the Level I trauma center, the burn center, and the only academic cancer program inside the city. It has the volume to build subspecialty programs natively. The Crouse-Upstate merger that would have given Upstate 1,200-plus combined acute-care beds collapsed in February 2023 after the Federal Trade Commission opposed the deal on competition grounds, citing the loss of price and quality competition between two large Syracuse providers. The two systems instead entered a strategic affiliation agreement that left both independent.
The second competitor is Crouse Health, with 506 licensed acute-care adult beds, 57 bassinets, 23,000 inpatient cases per year, 56,000 emergency visits and more than 600,000 outpatient visits annually. Crouse is the regional perinatal anchor and has historically held more obstetrics volume than St. Joseph’s. The Upstate-Crouse affiliation gives Crouse access to Upstate academic specialists without an FTC challenge.
The third competitor is the regional academic-cancer alternative. Patients diagnosed with thoracic cancer who do not use the Roswell Park-St. Joseph’s pathway historically went to Upstate’s cancer program on East Adams Street, or referred out to Memorial Sloan Kettering or Dana-Farber. The Roswell Park brand inside St. Joseph’s is the wedge against both alternatives. Trinity Health’s portfolio answer to the academic-cancer-center question is partnership rather than ownership, and the Care Network fits that pattern.
Timeline ahead
The visible 2026 calendar for St. Joseph’s looks like this.
Timeline assembled from St. Joseph’s, Roswell Park and Trinity Health press releases plus the WSYR-TV reporting on the 2025-26 flu surge.
The dates patients and employees in Liverpool and Camillus should watch: first, the 12-month volume report on the thoracic line, likely landing in third-quarter 2026 if Roswell Park follows its typical communications cadence. Second, the next New York State Department of Health Certificate of Need filings for any added imaging or operating-room capacity at the West Taft Road campus, which would tip whether the suburban primary-care hub is being expanded into a full ambulatory-surgery center. Third, the regional Trinity Health budget cycle, which sets capital allocation for fiscal 2027 in late summer 2026.
Risks and unknowns
The strategy carries several specific risks that frame the story for the next 18 months.
One, volume capture is not guaranteed. The Care Network affiliation gives St. Joseph’s a Roswell Park academic appointment for its surgeons. It does not, by itself, change referral patterns. Primary care physicians in Onondaga County have multi-decade referral habits, and shifting even a tenth of those toward the new program is a marketing problem that the system has yet to test publicly.
Two, the flu surge revealed real capacity stress. Opening 28 surge beds inside a 451-bed hospital is a feature, not a bug, of incident-command planning, but it implies that the cushion is thin. A 2026-2027 respiratory season as severe as the one just ended would compete directly with elective surgical capacity, which is where the thoracic line lives.
Three, workforce remains the single largest open question. St. Joseph’s reports 3,391 employees and 1,200 licensed physicians, but vacancy rates by department are not disclosed in the available materials. The hospital is competing for nursing staff against Upstate at higher academic-medical-center pay bands and against Crouse, while Micron’s construction phase pulls support staff into higher-wage positions in Clay.
Four, the 2024 revenue and patient-volume figures are sourced from third-party aggregators and from St. Joseph’s own community-profile disclosures, not from the audited 990. Trinity Health’s New York region consolidates its disclosure across St. Joseph’s and St. Peter’s, which makes a clean Syracuse-only revenue read difficult. The $420 million estimate from Zippia is in line with peer-hospital revenue per bed nationally, but the audited number should be read off the 2024 Form 990 once it is posted.
Five, the Crouse-Upstate competitive picture is not static. Although the merger was dropped in 2023, both hospitals have continued to deepen the affiliation arrangement that replaced it. If that arrangement converts into something more formal, the FTC posture from 2023 will be tested again, and the competitive math for the third-place St. Joseph’s franchise will shift.
Bottom line
The St. Joseph’s Health story for 2026 is not the merger that did not happen. It is the cancer franchise that is being built by importing Buffalo academic firepower into a 451-bed Catholic-system hospital, anchored by a suburban primary-care hub on the Liverpool side of Onondaga Lake, executed under a Trinity Health New York region structure that consolidates two states of operating geography under a single regional CEO. The thoracic line will live or die on volume, the flu surge proved capacity is a binding constraint, and the workforce competition with Micron and Upstate is still the open variable.
Editor’s note: Truth-check by Frank Mahoney, Editor-in-Chief, CNY Signal. Every dollar figure, employee count, patient-volume number, and executive name in this report was verified against a primary or accredited secondary source listed in the inline citations. The $420 million revenue figure is a third-party aggregator estimate pending publication of the 2024 Form 990. The 700-bed Upstate figure is per Upstate’s published fact sheet covering both campuses. Patient stories were not included because no first-person sources met the standard for inclusion.
