Interview: Mary Ann Boccolini

Mary Ann Boccolini

President & CEO Samaritan Healthcare & Hospice

What innovations do you anticipate will become permanent in your field?

I am proud to say that our Samaritan teams provided uninterrupted care for all our patients – in hospice, palliative care and primary care at home – throughout the pandemic. COVID-19 served as a catalyst for the innovative utilization of technologies in care. We have incorporated telemedicine to supplement the in-person visits from our team. We developed virtual grief support, music therapy, and meditation resources to help relieve stress and anxiety. We will continue to use technology to enhance our care due to the highly positive response from our patients and their families. As we move forward, we will use technology to enhance the direct care we provide during the essential home visits by our compassionate professionals. We are also using other technologies inherent to strengthening our capacity to monitor, check in and reassure our patients. We provide an essential lifeline to help ensure their safety, comfort and peace of mind.

How are you keeping your services affordable?

The Medicare Hospice Benefit is a unique and comprehensive, patient-focused and cost-effective model of care. Services are fully covered for Medicare beneficiaries. The essential services needed to enable our patients to remain in the comfort of home includes our team of physicians, nurses, social workers, chaplains, spiritual support counselors, and home health aides along with medications, medical equipment and more.

Now the healthcare industry is exploring value-based care and alternative payment models, among other options, to assure the highest quality, cost-effective care for the best possible patient experience. With our excellent reputation, expanding services, advanced clinical expertise and infrastructure, Samaritan is well positioned to demonstrate the value of our care. For many years now we have consistently exceeded the national quality benchmarks as reported by the families of our hospice patients.

Healthcare businesses accounted for over $44 billion of state GDP in 2019.

( ) All told, $29.8 billion in wages were paid out by New Jersey healthcare employers in 2019, which was about 12.7% of all private sector wages. And the future looks bright ahead: in the decade from 2018 to 2028, it is estimated that 64,860 jobs will be added, increasing annually by 1.2%.

Jobs in the New Jersey health sector can be divided into distinct groups: 49% work in ambulatory healthcare services, 32% work in hospitals and 19% work in nursing and residential care services. Indeed, of the 25 fastestgrowing occupations in the state, four are directly related to the health industry: nurse practitioners (No. 2 fastest-growing job), biochemists (12th), physicians and surgeons (22nd), and medical and health services managers (23rd).

The state’s hospitals, including those in South Jersey, are world class and it does better than the rest of the country on many metrics. Fittingly, as this state is the most densely populated in the country, there are 113 hospitals and 71 acute care hospitals. According to the 2019-2020 tabulations of US News & World Reports, five of these are nationally ranked and 15 meet highperforming national standards.

In South Jersey, Ocean Medical Center, Virtua Voorhees Hospital and AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center all rank impressively, coming within the Top 10 in the state, according to US News rankings. The leading star of the South Jersey hospital galaxy is Cooper University HealthCare, a part of the Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in Camden, and one of the mainstays of the region, having been serving South Jersey for 125 years and includes the world-class MD Anderson Cancer Center.

COVID-19 The COVID-19 pandemic, which started locking down the world in early 2020 and hit the United States in March 2020, put the South Jersey health system under unprecedented strain.

As the virus advanced in the state, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy took extraordinary efforts to curb contagions, declaring a state of emergency on March 9. This led to schools and universities closing and moving to online classes the following day.

On March 16, a statewide emergency began and many non-essential businesses closed. Even with these measures, New Jersey had the 11th-highest number of cases per capita — 1,023,395 total reported cases (as of June 2021) — and the highest death count per capita: 26,452. By early July 2021, the state was still in Phase 2 of its reopening.

The health sector, while giving its all to address this crisis, faced a year unlike any other. Frontline workers experienced burnout on a massive scale. Overtime work and stress took a heavy toll on practitioners as they fought the surging virus.

Economically, the virus landed another severe blow. From March 27, 2020, until May 2021, Murphy banned elective surgeries and dental procedures (those nonessential for health reasons) to help stop the spread of the virus and to free up hospital space and medical workers. For many healthcare providers, such surgeries are a financial lifeline.

As well, hospitals (like everywhere) had to devote a large swathe of their resources to increasing safety measures and access to personal protective equipment in the face of the pandemic. New rules and facts on the ground such as these had the incongruous effect of some health workers losing their jobs in the midst of ( )