UAB Hospital prepares for a CEO transition as Brenda Carlisle sets retirement timeline
Brenda Carlisle, BSN, RN, plans to retire as CEO of UAB Hospital in Birmingham, Ala., at the end of 2026, setting in motion a leadership handoff at one of the state’s major academic medical centers. The transition will begin earlier, with Michelle Fortune, BSN, RN, stepping in as interim CEO effective Nov. 1, according to a health system news release dated Oct. 22.
The sequencing is deliberate. Carlisle will remain with UAB Medicine through the end of the year to support the transfer of responsibilities, while also working with the CEOs of UAB St. Vincent’s Birmingham, UAB St. Vincent’s East and UAB Medical West as the system searches for a market president to coordinate operations across its Birmingham-area community hospitals.
Leadership changes in large health systems rarely concern title changes alone. They affect patient flow, staffing alignment, service-line coordination and how quickly a system can respond when academic, tertiary and community hospital priorities collide. At a place like UAB, continuity matters because the hospital’s role extends beyond a single campus; it sits inside a broader network that depends on synchronized decision-making across multiple sites and levels of care.
Carlisle brings more than 30 years of healthcare leadership experience across academic medical centers, tertiary care hospitals and community hospitals. Fortune brings more than 25 years of healthcare leadership experience and joined UAB Medicine in 2025. Since arriving, she has led hospital operations with a focus on patient access, operational performance and clinical capacity.
Interim leadership will center on access, throughput and hospital capacity
Those operational priorities are not abstract administrative language. Patient access determines whether individuals can enter the system without delay. Operational performance affects how efficiently beds, staff and services are deployed. Clinical capacity shapes whether the hospital can absorb demand without compromising timely care.
Fortune’s background fits that operational profile. Before joining UAB Medicine, she served as ministry president of surgery and gastroenterology for Mercy in Chesterfield, Mo. She also held executive leadership roles at Atrium Health in Charlotte, N.C., including hospital CEO and systemwide service line leadership positions. That mix of hospital-level and service-line leadership suggests familiarity with the interlocking pressures that define modern health system management: bed utilization, specialty throughput, referral coordination and the need to keep high-acuity services moving without friction.
In academic health systems, executive turnover can reverberate well beyond the CEO’s office. A hospital CEO often sits at the junction of medical staff expectations, nursing leadership, academic priorities, market competition and regional service integration. A stable interim appointment can blunt disruption, especially when a retiring chief executive remains in place long enough to preserve institutional memory and keep strategic work moving.
Carlisle stays through year-end as UAB coordinates a wider system transition
Carlisle’s continued presence through the end of the year gives the organization a bridge between eras. Her role during that interval includes supporting the leadership transition and helping manage the work of recruiting a market president for the Birmingham-area community hospital network. That search matters because coordination across UAB St. Vincent’s Birmingham, UAB St. Vincent’s East and UAB Medical West requires a leader who can align operations across distinct facilities while preserving a coherent system strategy.
Health systems often face the challenge of balancing local hospital identity with enterprise-wide standardization. Community hospitals may need different operational rhythms from academic or tertiary centers, yet they still depend on shared leadership expectations, clinical transfer pathways and consistent access strategies. The market president role appears designed to sit in that space, linking site-level execution with system-level planning.
Carlisle’s career span across academic medical centers, tertiary care hospitals and community hospitals is relevant in that context. Experience across those settings often shapes how leaders approach transfer relationships, physician engagement, capacity planning and the operational pressure points that emerge when patients move between levels of care. In a networked system, those details can determine whether the right patient reaches the right setting without unnecessary delay.
Michelle Fortune’s appointment as interim CEO also signals confidence in internal continuity. She has only been with UAB Medicine since 2025, but her operational portfolio already includes core responsibilities that matter in a transition year. Patient access and clinical capacity are not side issues in hospital leadership; they influence everything from emergency department flow to elective procedure scheduling and inpatient bed availability.
UAB’s handoff reflects the operational stakes of large health system governance
The announcement places UAB Hospital inside a larger leadership realignment rather than a simple retirement notice. Carlisle’s departure timeline stretches to the end of 2026, yet the active CEO transition begins in November, with Fortune assuming interim duties while the organization continues to recruit for broader regional coordination.
For clinicians and administrators, the practical question is how the hospital sustains momentum during the transition. Large systems depend on stable governance to keep service lines aligned, preserve access, and avoid lapses in operational execution. A CEO change can be seamless when the outgoing leader remains engaged, the interim leader has relevant operational depth, and the institution’s leadership structure is broad enough to absorb the handoff.
Fortune’s prior work at Mercy and Atrium Health adds another layer to that picture. Roles spanning surgery, gastroenterology, hospital leadership and systemwide service lines are closely tied to the types of operational decisions that can make a hospital run smoothly or buckle under pressure. In a setting with academic obligations, tertiary care demands and community hospital coordination, that background may prove especially useful.
The transition now turns on execution. Carlisle’s retirement at the end of 2026 creates a defined endpoint, but the immediate task is preserving continuity across hospital operations while UAB recruits a market president and sustains alignment among its Birmingham-area facilities. The organization has set a long runway for change, and the value of that runway will depend on how well interim leadership, system coordination and regional hospital operations stay synchronized over the next year and beyond.