NC Justice Center has not received response to request for WakeMed-Atrium deal

RALEIGH (September 18, 2026) – The North Carolina Justice Center still has not received a response to a public records request submitted to Wake County for the actual terms of the agreement between WakeMed and Atrium Health. Hospital executives have refused to publish any part of the deal because they consider it to be “competitive information.”

However, with the Wake County Commission set to vote on Monday, some of the most basic aspects of the agreement between WakeMed and Atrium still have not been made public. These include Atrium’s powers as “sole member,” i.e. sole owner, of WakeMed.

Nathan Foster, Health Policy Specialist at the NC Justice Center, said the following: “We submitted a public records request for the deal between WakeMed and Atrium on August 6, more than a month ago. We have received no response. Wake County should at least do the public the courtesy of explaining why they won’t show us the deal.”

Instead of the underlying deal, the public has only seen proposed amended Articles of Incorporation of WakeMed, and proposed changes to the transfer agreement between WakeMed and Wake County. These are high-level documents that provide almost no detail about how a merger between WakeMed and Atrium would actually work.

The request submitted by the NC Justice Center allows for confidential information to be excluded, so long as the excluded material is identified and a written explanation is given. The exact language of the request, which has a number of 26-3225, is as follows:

“Please submit all documents or records related to any agreement between WakeMed and Atrium Health, the Charlotte Mecklenburg Hospital Authority, and/or Advocate Health that have been provided to the board of commissioners, the county manager, the county attorney, or any other body or agency of Wake County.”

“Please submit all documents or records related to the second amendment to the Transfer Agreement and WakeMed’s Amended and Restated Articles.”

“If such documents or records include confidential information, please redact the confidential information and provide the rest of the document or record. If documents or records are marked confidential in their entirety, please state with specificity the basis or grounds for not producing such material, and why it was not possible to reasonably separate or redact the portion of withheld material from that material which must be disclosed.”

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