The basics:
RWJBarnabas Health is laying out its vision to transform health care in Monmouth County.
The health system announced Oct. 17 the New Jersey Department of Health advanced its plans to build a 252-bed modern acute care hospital in Tinton Falls on the Vogel Medical Campus. Located at Fort Monmouth, the site will also include the Specialty and Cancer Care Center, currently under construction.
NJDOL deemed RWJBarnabas Health’s Certificate of Need application complete. That clearance allows the project to move forward to the next phase of the review and approval process.
“RWJBarnabas Health is building a health care model for the future right here in Monmouth County,” said Eric Carney, president and CEO of Monmouth Medical Center and Monmouth Medical Center Southern Campus in Lakewood. “Our bold vision includes new and improved facilities designed to meet the evolving needs of our community, driven by the expertise of our providers and feedback from our patients.”
Of course, the topline question is what becomes of the more than 135-year-old Monmouth Medical Center?
This vision lays out plans for the new acute care hospital to rise just 5 miles from Monmouth Medical Center’s Long Branch campus.
Not leaving Long Branch
Carney stressed the project will include modernizing the Long Branch campus while also maintaining critical emergency and behavioral health services, as well as overnight observation beds.
Several renovations plan to update the largest patient care tower and the building’s façade, along with adding parking. Officials say the efforts in Long Branch will focus on centralizing care and creating greater efficiency and ease of access.
“We are reaffirming our commitment to Long Branch by continuing to invest in Monmouth Medical Center,” said Carney. “Upgrading this facility will allow us to continue providing high-quality health care in Long Branch well into the future, ensuring we meet the evolving needs of the community for generations to come.”
Key project details:
The projected construction timeline would take place over the next decade, with hopes to break ground on the acute care hospital in 2027.
“Once approved, the new, modern hospital will elevate health care for patients, families, and caregivers across Monmouth County,” said Carney. “We are prioritizing the delivery of high-quality, safe and compassionate care at an easily accessible location near the Garden State Parkway and other major roadways.”
“The Long Branch campus will continue to provide essential services, while the new acute care hospital in Tinton Falls, with its close proximity to the Garden State Parkway and other major roadways, will bring Monmouth Medical Center’s nationally recognized clinical care closer to more people we serve across the county and region.”
First-hand look
Hospital leadership held a briefing Oct. 17 at Monmouth Medical Center. NJBIZ was on-hand as officials laid out this vision, next steps, key details and more.
“We’re very excited to share with you our vision for the Vogel Medical Campus and the expansion of Monmouth Medical Center,” Carney told reporters. “But it’s a more complete story than just about a single campus. It’s really about how we’re redesigning health care in Monmouth County. And it connects, I think, a lot of the dots of some of the other centers and programs that you’ve likely noted as you’re driving around Monmouth County.
“And you see RWJBarnabas Health on the façade of various buildings that are bringing care closer to the community we serve.”
Carney said that’s really what the spirit of this redesign of health care delivery is about. And he said that starts with access.
He noted that Monmouth Medical Center holds a license for 510 beds. Meanwhile, MMC has an average of 230 patients at the hospital at any given time. He also gave some of the history of the hospital and campus: what it has become and how critical it is to the future of the hospital and community.
Core services
“We have become a hospital that is largely sub-specialized in three critical areas: surgery, inpatient behavioral health and mother/baby or maternity care,” Carney explained. “When you look at the patient population in our hospital – 72% of our patients … are in those three core services.”
Carney noted how elective Monmouth Medical Center is. He pointed out how many people choose to come there for these types of services.
“So, that means that people are coming … here because we offer a surgical service that they need. And they will come electively, and then stay for a night or two to recover. They’re coming to deliver a baby, or they’re being admitted into one of our three inpatient behavioral health units,” he said.
“If you look at the number of patients that are admitted into our hospital from our emergency room – and this has really become an important point when we talk about where our services are best-positioned in our community. Eighteen percent of the patients in our hospital come from our emergency room,” he explained. “If I compare that to the average in RWJBarnabas Health, that number is 75%.
People do not rely on us primarily for medical care through our emergency room. — Eric Carney, president and CEO, Monmouth Medical Center and MMC Southern Campus in Lakewood
“Meaning the far majority of the patients in our health system originate through our emergency room. There are hospitals that have as many as 90% of their patients come through the emergency room.”
He said that MMC is not that type of hospital.
“People do not rely on us primarily for medical care through our emergency room,” said Carney. “When we look at our population in total, our patients are originating from all the way from southern Middlesex County all the way to northern Ocean County.”
A glimpse of the future
As the hospital understood where its patients originated from, Carney said it became clear that the Vogel Medical Campus was an important part of its future.
The officials then did a presentation with visuals of the project overview.
“This 36-acre parcel is what we call the Vogel Medical Campus. It is located off of Hope Road,” said Carney, noting its proximity to the Garden State Parkway. “If you’re driving up today, milepost 107, and you look above the tree line, you’re going to see this first building. This is our first outpatient center. It’s called our Specialty and Cancer Care Center. And in this building, will be the future home of all cancer services for Monmouth Medical Center.
“These services are being offered in partnership with the National Cancer Institute in New Jersey, which is only NCI-designated cancer center in the state. But in addition to cancer services, we’ll have outpatient surgery, and we’re going to have outpatient imaging here. So, this becomes, really, the first phase of our project.”
Carney then moved to the second phase, which pertains to the NJDOH-advanced acute care hospital project.
“This will be a future expansion hospital of Monmouth Medical Center,” said Carney. “This is a 252-bed hospital. That will be essentially oriented in two towers. This tower here would be our mother-baby tower, and this tower will be our medical surgical tower. We will also have a full-service emergency room here.
“We’ll have a full-service operating room suite. All of our diagnostic platforms – like cardiac, cath – those procedures will be done here. Completing out the rest of the campus is a parking garage, as well as an outpatient building for physician offices.”
Room to grow
As Carney continued, he highlighted the plans will lead to the development of much of that 36-acre Vogel Medical Campus parcel. He noted how the current Monmouth Medical Center sits on just a fraction of that.
“When we are looking at the future of Monmouth Medical Center, and in 2016, we had an architectural assessment done. And that architectural assessment showed that the campus here in Long Branch would not sustain hospital operations for more than a decade,” said Carney. “It really started to force us to look at what we were doing. And how can we then modernize this campus?
“[W]hat we understood is that we are currently situated on a 13-acre parcel here. And as we looked at, how do we build a modern hospital – the modern hospital that our community deserves? We realized that we just could not accommodate it on such a small parcel of land,” Carney explained. “If we could, what would likely have been the result – is we would have had to remove a tower, build a tower, remove a tower, build a tower.
“A project that would have taken well over a decade to complete. [It] would have been as costly as building a new campus on a new plot of land.”
A ‘clear’ decision
That entire time, Carney stressed, the hospital would be under construction.
“And we would have been curtailing services to our community. We don’t have a footprint to just build the new patient care tower here. … It would have ended up with a campus that was very horizontally organized and terribly inefficient,” said Carney. “Unlike what we’re going to build here, which is very vertically integrated – much more efficient. Which allows us to ultimately reduce the cost of care to our patients.
“So, the decision was clear that looking for a parcel of land other than our current footprint was the right step for us. And were blessed at that time to learn that the Vogel Medical Campus property, which formerly housed the Meyer Research Facility on the Fort Monmouth Campus, was available. And we started the process to acquire the land through FMERA [Fort Monmouth Economic Revitalization Authority].”
During the presentation, leaders stressed the importance of the Long Branch campus as well as continuing to serve the community.
“Long Branch still remains a very important part of our story,” said Carney.
That piece of the equation has led to some local pushback — including politically as well as from fellow health system giant, Hackensack Meridian Health. HMH operates nearby Jersey Shore University Medical Center in Neptune City and Riverview Medical Center in Red Bank.
Please stay tuned to NJBIZ for more on this ambitious project, further details, as well as reaction to the announcement.
732-483-4611
Service Areas
