"We're Just Getting Started." Bob Garrett on a Decade of Growth and What Comes Next for HMH
What You Need To Know
This summer marks 10 years since Hackensack University Health Network and Meridian Health came together to form Hackensack Meridian Health in one of the most successful mergers in U.S. health care history.
In honor of this important milestone, we asked Robert Garrett, President and CEO, to look back on a decade of growth, quality and culture, and to look ahead at where health care, and HMH, are headed next.
A Decade Defined by Quality and Growth
When you ask Mr. Garrett what he's most proud of from the past 10 years, and quality is quick to come to mind.
“HMH stands for superior quality," he said, pointing to the network's top-billed standing with U.S. News & World Report, its designation as New Jersey's first Honor Roll hospital (placing it among the top 20 in the country), its Leapfrog safety ratings and its CMS Star rankings.
For Mr. Garrett, those rankings represent something deeper than recognition on the national stage. "It means less deaths than are expected, less patient complications, less unnecessary readmissions — and it also means an incredible patient experience that's second to none.”
The network's footprint has expanded dramatically since 2016. Mr. Garrett points to the addition of several new hospitals, the build-out of an ambulatory care network that today spans 500 patient care locations across New Jersey, the launch of the Hospital From Home program, and the proposed merger between Hackensack Meridian Health and Hunterdon Health.
"The growth that we have seen over these last 10 years… I would not have imagined it when we started this great venture," Mr. Garrett said.
That growth, he added, is inseparable from the leadership of his late business partner, former co-CEO John Lloyd, who passed away in 2024. "We built something I think that's very special," Mr. Garrett said. "I know John's looking down upon all of us today, very proud that we've reached this 10-year milestone."
A Culture Built on the Strength of Its People
Mr. Garrett is quick to note that none of HMH's accomplishments, from the bar-none quality outcomes or the rapid growth of the network, would have been possible without the people behind them.
"None of those accomplishments could have occurred without a strong and aligned culture," he said. "I call our team members the best health care team, not just in New Jersey or the U.S., but actually the best health care team all around the world. And I do mean that from the bottom of my heart."
Innovation on the Cutting Edge
Mr. Garrett also points to innovation as a defining thread of the last decade — perhaps most notably, the bold launch of the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine.
"Who starts a new medical school? It's really kind of unheard of, but we did, and it's been successful," he said. The school recently celebrated its sixth commencement, and roughly half of its graduates since the school's founding have stayed in New Jersey to practice medicine, helping address physician shortages in the state.
The Center for Discovery and Innovation, HMH's research institute, also played a defining role during the COVID-19 pandemic, developing a new test just days after the pandemic hit. Mr. Garrett credits frontline teams for the network's pandemic response more broadly.
"They created something out of nothing. They were innovative on the front lines each and every day." One of the lasting lessons of that period, he said, was the importance of trusting frontline staff to make decisions in real time.
Looking Ahead: Care Beyond Hospital Walls
The last decade has been a whirlwind for the network. But what do the next 10 years look like? Mr. Garrett points to three converging trends: ambulatory care, home-based care and technology like AI and precision medicine.
Care will increasingly move beyond the traditional health care setting, though it doesn’t mean hospitals will become less important.
"The population is aging. We're still going to need acute care services, and that's why we're investing in our hospitals now," Mr. Garrett said. But parallel to that investment, he expects the network's 500 ambulatory locations to keep growing, consolidating into comprehensive "one-stop shopping" health and wellness centers like HMH's recently opened Metropark location, which houses physician offices, urgent care, surgery, imaging and a pharmacy under one roof.
When it comes to home-based care, HMH is already on the cutting edge thanks to the Hospital From Home program.
“I think people are going to want to be cared for more in the privacy of their homes,” Mr. Garrett said. “We saw that starting with COVID, right? People couldn't leave their homes so care went to them. I think more acute care type services will be delivered at home with technology like remote monitoring so that people can be monitored very safely 24 hours, 7 days a week. In some ways, they'll even be able to be monitored more closely than they are in our hospitals.”
On artificial intelligence, Mr. Garrett strikes a tone of enthusiasm, paired with a healthy dose of caution.
"The potential in health care for AI to produce better quality outcomes, to allow clinicians to actually diagnose disease a lot quicker... I think it's going to be a total gamechanger," he said. Still, it’s clear that deployment has to be deliberate. "We have to have good governance... and make sure the data that's fed into the artificial intelligence algorithms is accurate and not biased. But I do think AI and other technologies will really be gamechangers for health care as we think about the future.”
He points to virtual nursing as one early example already paying off by taking time-consuming tasks off frontline team members' plates so they can spend more time with patients.
Still, Mr. Garrett was emphatic that technology will support HMH's team members, not replace them. "At the end of the day, health care will still be a team sport. It's all going to be about people," he said. "Our team at Hackensack Meridian Health is going to be more important even 10 years from now than they are today. It's going to be an amazing, amazing decade. We're just getting started."