Rutgers and RWJBarnabas require leaders who can sustain one of nation’s top academic health systems, their leaders argue

• A new bipartisan bill aims to strengthen the integration between Rutgers and RWJBarnabas Health.
• The legislation would allow senior executives to be employed and paid by both institutions.
• Proponents argue this will help New Jersey compete for top medical talent and improve patient access to advanced care.
• The goal is to shorten the distance between medical research and patient treatment within the state.

For generations, New Jerseyans facing a serious diagnosis have assumed that getting the most advanced care means crossing a bridge or state line. Those with the means and ability often travel to New York City or Philadelphia in search of a promising clinical trial, a renowned specialist or a cutting-edge treatment.

But world-class medicine should not depend on a family’s financial resources or ability to travel. New Jersey now has expert researchers, physicians, hospitals and academic institutions to bring more of the medicine of tomorrow to patients here at home.

Doing that requires breaking down some of the traditional walls between medical research and patient care as well as building a unified team that spans the state.

The best discoveries in medicine rarely stay on one side of the wall between a university and its teaching hospitals. A finding in a Rutgers laboratory needs clinical partners to translate it into a new treatment. A pattern identified by an RWJBarnabas Health physician caring for patients can ultimately lead to a new study and a better standard of care.

That is why the nation’s strongest academic health systems work so deliberately to connect research, medical education and clinical care. They recognize that the distance between a laboratory and a patient’s bedside should be as short as possible.

Why the affiliation of Rutgers and RWJBarnabas matters for NJ

New Jersey now has an opportunity to strengthen those connections.

State lawmakers recently came together to pass A-5350/S-4515, bipartisan legislation designed to strengthen the integration of Rutgers and its affiliated academic health system. It would allow a narrow category of senior executives with responsibility for medical education, research or clinical care to be employed and compensated for work performed across both Rutgers and an affiliated nonprofit health system.

That may sound like an obscure matter of organizational governance. For patients, however, what is at stake is much more consequential.

Since our two institutions entered into an affiliation in 2018, our goal has been to more closely connect Rutgers’ extraordinary strengths in education and research with the physicians, hospitals and communities served by RWJBarnabas Health to build an academic health system capable of competing with the very best in the country.

We can already see what that type of integration makes possible.

At the Jack & Sheryl Morris Cancer Center in New Brunswick, cancer research and treatment are being brought together under one roof. Scientists studying the fundamental biology of cancer work within the same academic health system as physicians treating patients, conducting clinical trials, and developing new approaches to care. The objective is not institutional integration for its own sake. It is getting discoveries out of laboratories and into the hands of physicians — and ultimately to patients — faster.

A truly integrated statewide academic health system can create pathways through which medical innovation across disciplines reaches patients throughout New Jersey. The long-term opportunity is to bring more clinical trials, subspecialty and worldclass expertise, and the most advanced and cutting-edge therapies closer to where people live, rather than requiring every patient to find the time, transportation, and financial resources to seek them elsewhere. Medical innovation only fulfills its promise when patients can access it.

Delivering on that promise also requires recruiting and retaining the people who make medical breakthroughs possible.Physician-scientists increasingly work at the intersection of research, teaching, and patient care. The most accomplished among them can choose where to build their careers, and New Jersey competes for that talent every day against the nation’s leading academic medical centers.

The integrated model in the bipartisan bill is not new; leading institutions across the country are already putting it into practice. Vanderbilt University Medical Center runs shared, cross-institutional research infrastructure — spanning recruitment, trial design and data science — built around faculty who simultaneously hold responsibilities on both the university and health-system sides. Case Western Reserve and University Hospitals, meanwhile, have committed nearly $22 million through 2030 to recruit and retain investigators through a joint leadership structure that helps them compete for top talent.

None of this is incidental. It’s an operating model for institutions that want to be at the forefront of innovation and want research to reach patients quickly.

We cannot afford to lose talented leadership

If our structures make it unnecessarily difficult for a physician-leader to oversee research at a university while also exercising meaningful responsibility and leadership for the clinical programs where research reaches patients, New Jersey is competing with one hand tied behind its back. When we lose a leading physician-scientist, we risk losing far more than one employee. Research teams, federal grants, clinical trials and specialty programs can follow.

For patients, the benefits are straightforward: faster access to discoveries, more opportunities to participate in clinical trials, greater access to highly specialized physicians and the best possible care delivered closer to home.

The Garden State has spent decades building exceptional hospitals, a world-class public research university, outstanding medical schools and a growing biomedical and life-sciences sector. We should be connecting and emboldening those assets, not erecting artificial barriers between them.

Ultimately, this is about building an academic health system capable of turning New Jersey discoveries into New Jersey treatments and making them available whether a patient lives in Newark, New Brunswick, Toms River or anywhere else in our state.

New Jersey patients should not have to cross a bridge to reach the future of medicine.

George Helmy is executive vice president and chief corporate affairs officer at RWJBarnabas Health. Andrew Evens is deputy director for clinical services and chief physician officer at the Rutgers Cancer Institute and associate vice chancellor, clinical innovation and data analytics at Rutgers Health.

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