Rhode Island Hospital names new CEO

DR. TIMOTHY J. BABINEAU, a surgeon now serving as senior VP and chief medical officer at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, will take over as president and CEO of Rhode Island Hospital effective Oct. 1. /
DR. TIMOTHY J. BABINEAU, a surgeon now serving as senior VP and chief medical officer at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, will take over as president and CEO of Rhode Island Hospital effective Oct. 1. /

PROVIDENCE – More than a year after Dr. Joseph F. Amaral stepped down as president and CEO of Rhode Island Hospital, a successor has been chosen: Dr. Timothy J. Babineau, a surgeon with an MBA who is now a senior executive at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

Babineau, who is to join Rhode Island Hospital on Oct. 1, has served as senior vice president and chief medical officer at UMMC since 2005. As well as leading the medical and pharmacy staff, he oversees quality improvement, patient safety, health information management and graduate medical education. He also serves on the University of Maryland medical faculty.

Like Rhode Island Hospital, UMMC is a large urban facility; both are teaching hospitals. UMMC – located in downtown Baltimore – has more than 30,000 inpatient admissions per year, employs about 5,700 people and trains more than half of Maryland’s physicians. Rhode Island Hospital had more than 33,000 patient discharges in fiscal 2006 and employs more than 6,500 people.

Babineau’s selection was announced to the hospital staff, the media and the general public with an event this morning at RIH’s Hasbro Children’s Hospital.

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Lifespan President and CEO George A. Vecchione – who introduced Babineau – praised his credentials in academic medicine, his vision and his commitment to quality.

Babineau himself kept his initial remarks light, focusing on his basic management philosophy – “active listening” – and his desire to help Rhode Island Hospital continue to develop as an outstanding academic medical center.

Asked whether he had any specific mandate, he said no, adding that “it would be naïve” for him to presume that he knows the hospital well enough to set goals of his own. But all academic hospitals face some common challenges, including a shortage of physicians, the high cost of technology and the decline in federal funding, Babineau said.

He emphasized his own experience as a clinician. that “I’ve been in the trenches for 22 years,” he said, and thus nows what it’s like to “be shoulder-to-shoulder” with medical professionals trying to do their best under sometimes less-than-ideal conditions.

Babineau joins Rhode Island Hospital at a challenging time. A planned merger between the hospital’s parent, Lifespan, and the Care New England system is stalled in the regulatory system (READ MORE), and the hospital has been disciplined after several major surgical errors.

Financially, however, Rhode Island Hospital is doing better than it has for years, with narrow but steady operating profits and several major capital improvement projects – some already completed, and others ongoing – that have transformed its South Providence campus.

Vecchione has served as the hospital’s interim leader since Amaral’s departure. (The former CEO, a surgeon with an expertise in minimally invasive procedures, has yet to take a new job.)

Asked why it had taken so long to find a replacement, Vecchione said that before launching its search, Lifespan had wanted to set clear priorities for the hospital’s new leader, seeking input from various constituencies. The search itself – led by an outside firm that was hired in February – attracted physicians and non-physician applicants in about equal numbers, he said.

Vecchione described Babineau as a particularly good fit, both for his credentials and as a person. Asked whether the incoming CEO’s lack of experience on the business side of hospital management – running construction projects, for example – would be an issue, Vecchione said “absolutely not,” because the hospital’s management team is “superb.”

Babineau – like Amaral – has spent most of his career as a practicing surgeon in New England.

The top medical graduate in his class at the University of Massachusetts School of Medicine, he completed his residency and a fellowship at New England Deaconess Hospital – now part of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

From 1991 to 1999, Babineau taught surgery at Harvard Medical School and served on the surgical staff at Beth Israel, where he also chaired the medical informatics committee.

In 1999, he went to work at Boston Medical Center and Boston University School of Medicine, where he headed the surgical residency program and was chief of gastrointestinal surgery and director of the Center for Minimally Invasive Surgery, among other roles. He earned his MBA at Boston University.

Rhode Island Hospital, a private nonprofit institution founded in 1863, is a founding member of the Lifespan health care system. Additional information is available at www.RhodeIslandHospital.org .

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