Jersey Shore hospital names new president, a familiar face

Jersey Shore University Medical Center, one of the largest hospitals in the state, has a new president: Dr. Kenneth N. Sable, who began his new job this week.Sable comes to the 658-bed Jersey Shore from Saint Peter’s Healthcare System in New Brunswick, where for the past two years he was executive vice president and chief operating officer. At Jersey Shore he succeeds Steven G. Littleson, who in May was named executive vice president, Meridian Health, and president of Meridian Hospitals Corporation.

“Ken is a proven leader, outstanding clinician, and a great fit for the Meridian Health family,” Littleton said. “And, after conducting a national search, we are lucky to have found a leader who lives right in Monroe Township and is familiar with Jersey Shore to serve as the hospital’s next president.”

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As Sable starts his new job at Jersey Shore, he is also marking his homecoming to the Neptune hospital. In 1997, as a medical student at nearby Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Sable did rotations in pediatrics and neurology at Jersey Shore, the largest of the six hospitals in the Meridian Health system.

Sable, 41, said much has changed since the late 1990s — at Meridian and in the health care landscape across New Jersey and the nation. He’s eager to lead Jersey Shore into the new era of population health management, in which health care providers take responsibility not just for curing the sick, but for keeping the community healthy.

“We are learning how to thrive and survive and prosper in the new paradigm of health care delivery and health care reform, which is changing faster than many of us can keep up with,” Sable said. And he said the future “will revolve around population health. And that is basically being able to deploy our health care delivery system to better serve the community and keep populations healthy — as opposed to the traditional hospital, where we’re taking care of sick people. That is a change in focus for health care and we want to be in the forefront of leading that effort.”

Littleson had led Jersey Shore since 1997, and he was running the hospital back when Sable was a medical student at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, now part of Rutgers University.

While doing clinical rotations at Jersey Shore, Sable roomed with other med students “in a dormitory at the far back corner of the hospital,” he recalled “Those have since come down and there are new buildings in that location. Today, this is a much different campus — it is like night and day.”

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In 2009, Jersey Shore completed the $300 million renovation, including 400,000 square feet of new space, which added 108 new beds, a new emergency department, six operating rooms, a 950-space parking garage and a new central utility plant with cogeneration. The project was certified as a LEED Gold health care facility.

Sable said that, as health care undergoes transformational change, his mission will be to keep Jersey Shore focused on “providing phenomenal patient care.” He cited Jersey Shore’s designation as a Magnet hospital for nursing, an elite award earned by hospitals that excel at patient care. “It takes complete dedication and support from the administration all the way down to achieve and maintain that level of nursing care,” he said.

Health care systems are moving away from the traditional “fee-for-service” compensation model, toward one that rewards health care providers that deliver care that is both high quality and cost-effective. While the switch to the new paradigm remains a work in progress, “I don’t think it will be too far in the future,” Sable said. “We are already starting to see value-based purchasing on the governmental side (by Medicare) and more and more commercial payers are moving into that world as well. So we have to learn how to manage risk and be able to deal with that appropriately before we can fully transition away from a fee-for-service to a value-based purchasing model.”

Meanwhile, Meridian is poised for major systemwide change: last October, Meridian and Hackensack University Health Network announced a merger that will forge the state’s largest health care system, with $3.44 billion in revenue. Meridian had earlier announced a merger with Raritan Bay Medical Center.

Sable said the mergers “will give more stability to the system and allow for the development of more comprehensive services to patients. We can scale our services across more communities and share best practices.”

He said Meridian, Hackensack and Raritan Bay all “bring best practice to the table; there will be a real opportunity for information sharing to help us all do a better job at delivering health care in what is really a new environment.”

As a physician, Sable has an acute interest in Jersey Shore’s role as an academic medical center. Jersey Shore has 103 resident positions, in medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, podiatry, dentistry, pharmacy and sports medicine.

“As someone who went through resident training, I think (Meridian) recognized in recruiting me and bringing me on board that my background and knowledge will be extremely valuable for maintaining and further growing the academic enterprise here at the Jersey Shore campus,” Sable said.

Sable did his residency in emergency medicine at Cooper University Medical Center in Camden, and has an MBA from the University of Massachusetts; he earned his undergraduate degree in computer science and engineering at the University of Pennsylvania.

At Saint Peter’s, Sable led the renovation of the hospital’s 26,000-square-foot emergency department, and renewed the hospital’s academic relationship with Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.

Prior to joining Saint Peter’s Sable spent a decade at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where he was vice chairman of emergency department operations.

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