For Patricia Palmieri, who joined Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital Hamilton as senior vice president/chief operating and strategy officer in November 2012, her new position is a chance to return home.
Her family moved to Hamilton in 1959, when she was 7, and she still has a lot of family in the area. Her mother worked for the state and her father for the county, as a draftsman for the motor vehicle department. Palmieri graduated from Cathedral High School in Trenton.
After earning a five-year bachelor’s in pharmacy at Rutgers University, Palmieri started her career in a retail pharmacy but a few years later moved to the hospital world, in a pharmacy at Atlantic City Medical Center (now AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center). That’s when she developed a hankering for management and decided to go for a master’s in business administration at Drexel University. Once she had the MBA, she became director of AtlanticCare’s pharmacy, managing a department of about 50 employees.
“What I had to learn,” she said, “was not only the clinical knowledge of being a pharmacist but also human resources and financial management—everything you would need to run a department.”
After 10 years with AtlantiCare, Palmieri moved to Cardinal Health, where she directed a group of consultants to hospitals. Not only was she expanding her expertise beyond pharmacy to nursing, materials management and operating rooms, but she also gained experience across regions and hospital types.
“My group covered Maine to Virginia,” she says, “and I got to learn from small hospitals as well as large academic medical centers, each with uniquely different issues.”
Six years later, in 2006, she took a job as vice president of operations at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick. Here she was able to experience the different departments involved in hospital administration, including both clinical and non-clinical. By the time she left, she managed 800 employees and a $100-million-plus budget.
Palmieri considers her big accomplishment at RWJ in New Brunswick to be the opportunity she had to develop her people, who she says all had opportunities to get promoted from manager to director or from director to vice president. Her most significant initiative involved developing ambulatory services, that is, services for the community that were outside the hospital.
