RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers University: Better Together

Partners for a Healthier New Jersey

RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, jointly operate a world-class academic health system dedicated to life-changing research, clinical training of tomorrow’s workforce, and high-quality health care for all. This results from our shared commitment to improve access to care and reduce the health disparities that impact our state.

We are driven in this work by our shared belief that while we are strong leaders in our respective fields, together we are transforming health care in New Jersey and driving innovations that will improve outcomes across the country.

Improving Health, Improving Lives

Through our affiliation with Rutgers Health, the health care arm of Rutgers University, RWJBarnabas Health aims to bring its resources to improve the lives of our communities by:

• Advancing and deploying health science innovation
• Developing and expanding Centers of Excellence across a number of clinical specialties
• Increasing accessibility to primary and specialty physicians and clinicians
• Dedicating significant, collective resources to education, research, and health improvement
• Retaining leading clinical and academic faculty to build and expand clinical and research capabilities across New Jersey
• Focusing on the recruitment of new high-caliber principal investigators across the RWJBarnabas Health service area
• Providing financial support earmarked to encourage residents and fellows to remain in and provide care to residents of New Jersey
• Increasing opportunities to train medical, dental, nursing, pharmacy, and other health professional students in inter-professional clinical environments
• Expanding access to clinical trials, bringing new and promising treatments to patients across New Jersey

An Academic Health Care Powerhouse

Rutgers University is one of the nation's leading comprehensive public research universities, employing more than 23,600 faculty and staff and educating more than 71,000 students at locations across the state.

Through our long-standing relationship with Rutgers, including Rutgers’ two medical schools and schools of nursing, dentistry, pharmacy, allied health professions, public health and biomedical sciences, RWJBarnabas Health has access to medical research and treatment technologies.

Educational and research activities are consolidated under Rutgers’ leadership, in coordination with RWJBarnabas Health, and clinical services are consolidated under the leadership of RWJBarnabas Health, in coordination with Rutgers. RWJBarnabas Health works with Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and Rutgers New Jersey Medical School to train and educate more than 1,600 medical residents, interns and fellows throughout our many hospitals and other training locations each year.

Graduate Medical Education

Through our partnership with Rutgers, RWJBarnabas Health hospitals operate the largest non-medical school-based graduate medical education programs in New Jersey with approximately 1,600 residents and fellows located at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick and seven additional teaching hospitals with programs in most major specialties and subspecialties, including residency programs. In collaboration with Rutgers, we also operate a variety of subspecialty fellowship programs.

Advancing Research and Innovation

The partnership between Rutgers and RWJBarnabas Health presents an opportunity to transition discoveries from the laboratory bench to the bedside, leveraging the strengths of basic and computational sciences and engineering at the Rutgers New Brunswick campus.

Research output conducted by tenure-track faculty recruited and funded by RWJBarnabas Health helps earn grants that continue to establish platforms for cancer research, and translational clinical research, clinical trials coordination, clinical research data warehousing, training and career development.

Developing Biomedical Devices and Procedures

In line with RWJBarnabas Health’s commitment to innovation, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Research Evaluation and Commercialization Hubs (REACH) program helped establish an infrastructure that accelerates the translation of biomedical discoveries into commercially viable diagnostics, devices, therapeutics, and tools to enhance patient care, improve health outcomes, and cultivate the next generation of innovators.

To foster the expansion of research and innovation, the construction of the Jack and Sheryl Morris Cancer Center in New Brunswick is progressing steadily, slated for completion in 2025. Additionally, the development of the Helix complex across from Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick represents a statewide initiative that will offer 550,000 square feet of state-of-the-art space for translational research and venture capital incubators, accommodating approximately 50 new wet and dry laboratory researchers, and serve as the new home for Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; it is scheduled to open in early 2026.

Research to Make Health Care Delivery to Patients Easier

Rutgers Health, in collaboration with RWJBarnabas Health, secured a $4 million Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute/Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality sponsored award to support the career development of early-stage investigators in studies aimed at enhancing patient care through the utilization of a learning health system. This award, the only one of its kind in New Jersey, will employ cutting-edge dissemination and implementation science to analyze, develop, and deploy innovative solutions to address bottlenecks in healthcare delivery.

Genetic Testing

Rutgers Health also successfully competed for an All-of-U.S. NIH award, aiming to recruit more than 50,000 participants for comprehensive genetic testing, contributing to a pool of 1 million Americans across New Jersey.

Unifying Systems to Work Better Together

To strengthen core competencies in technology, analytics, and innovation, we are establishing a unified operating model that will drive standardization, continuous quality improvement and cost reductions across the entire system. A key component of this is the implementation of Epic, an integrated electronic health record (EHR) with supporting revenue cycle, data analytics and consumer-facing digital capabilities. The launch of this initiative, which has been named “Epic Together,” formally commenced in 2020, and is being completed in waves, with the last activation wave of the project scheduled for September 2024.

The partnership between RWJBarnabas Health and Rutgers University offers a wealth of opportunity for growth and innovation that will benefit patients, the medical profession and the communities we serve.