The chief executive of D.C.’s newest hospital is stepping down less than a year after Cedar Hill Regional Medical Center opened in Southeast Washington, a hospital spokeswoman said Thursday evening.
Anthony B. Coleman’s resignation is effective March 13, the hospital said.
Kimberlee Daniels, chief operating officer at George Washington University Hospital, will serve as interim chief executive of Cedar Hill starting Jan. 26.
“We are grateful for Tony’s leadership in opening Washington DC’s first new hospital in over 20 years, and we appreciate his commitment to improving the health status of Washingtonians. We wish him much success in his future endeavors,” hospital spokeswoman Susan LaRosa said in a statement.
Coleman will pursue “another healthcare opportunity,” she said. His resignation was first reported by WJLA-TV. Coleman did not respond to a request for comment.
Cedar Hill is a major pillar in D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s plan to address health disparities in Wards 7 and 8, where the life expectancy of residents is about 15 years lower than elsewhere in the city.
The District funded nearly all of the $434 million cost of building the 400,000-square-foot facility to offer labor and delivery, trauma servicesand other specialties to residents east of the Anacostia River. The hospital replaced United Medical Center.
With Coleman’s departure, the first senior leadership team at Cedar Hill, including the chief operating officer and the chief nursing officer, has turned over.
Universal Health Services, the parent company of George Washington University Hospital in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood, which the city tapped to operate Cedar Hill for 75 years, hired Coleman in November 2023 to shepherd preparations and hiring for the hospital, which opened in April.
At first, Coleman has said, the hospital emergency room was overwhelmed with patients after he could not hire enough nurses to staff as many inpatient beds as officials had planned. Months later, promised outpatient services such as family medicine, outpatient dialysis, orthopedics and cardiology had not materialized.
Starting in mid-December, however, the first outpatient providers in general surgery and obstetrics and gynecology offices started seeing patients two days a week by appointment, a hospital spokeswoman said.
The delays stem in part from a long-standing dispute between three parties: George Washington University, doctors at George Washington University Hospital, and Universal Health Services.
When city officials selected Universal Health Services to operate Cedar Hill, the doctors group GW Medical Faculty Associates was already losing money. The financial woes would grow to losses topping $400 million, prompting a renegotiation of a deal that keeps the Foggy Bottom hospital staffed and faculty teaching at the medical school.
If negotiations are successful, Universal Health Services will create a new doctors group that will employ a number of GW Medical Faculty Associates doctors to serve GW hospital and Cedar Hill, the university has said.
Coleman is a retired naval officer who previously ran a hospital in Iowa and before that worked at Kaiser Permanente in California.
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