When Princeton Healthcare System decided to move its hospital from its longtime home in downtown Princeton to its new site on Route 1 in Plainsboro, it broke a lot of tradition. Now it has broken another tradition: For the first time in its 91-year history a non-Princeton resident has been chosen as chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Princeton HealthCare System.
The new chair is Don Hofmann of West Windsor, a partner in a private equity firm, Crystal Ridge Partners, who begins his tenure at an historic time. During his three-year term, the new University Medical Center of Princeton at Plainsboro, the system’s replacement hospital for University Medical Center at Princeton, is scheduled to open.
Hofmann’s new role could be considered emblematic of the hospital’s desire to connect to the community outside of Princeton Borough and Township. Not only is the hospital being constructed in Plainsboro, on the other side of Route 1, it has been reaching out to the surrounding communities and their residents.
“The hospital serves many people from this side of Route 1,” said Hofmann, who says the hospital’s goal is to create a “greater presence in the community.”
In addition to his work in finance — Hofmann co-founded Crystal Ridge in 2005 after 15 years with JP Morgan and its predecessors — he also has considerable nonprofit experience. He served as a board member of HomeFront, a nonprofit group based in Lawrenceville that works with families to break the cycle of poverty. He is also a former trustee of Princeton Day School, where his two sons attended school.
But the Duxbury Court resident has always had a special interest in the hospital, where his two sons were born. “You develop an affinity for the place where your children are born,” he said.
Hofmann was born in northern New Jersey and lived in Wayne until his family moved to Delaware when he was 11 years old, when his father, a controller for a chemicals company, needed to relocate. While there, his mother did volunteer work for Christiana Hospital in Newark, Delaware, and won an award for 30 years of service. She provided rides to people who couldn’t get to the hospital and served as a Eucharistic minister. In addition, says Hofmann, “she would visit people on an as-needed basis. She was a kind soul.”
She did that on top of raising four boys — no easy task, Hofmann says. “My parents were very involved,” says Hofmann. “They didn’t talk a lot about it, but they did it.”
After Hofmann graduated from high school in Delaware, he attended Hofstra University, where he met his wife, Joyce (the couple’s 30th anniversary is approaching). He worked for a few years in New York and then earned his MBA at Harvard Business School in 1983.
Upon graduation, he and his wife, who owns Princeton Weight Loss, moved to Lawrenceville, where they lived for three years before moving to West Windsor in 1987. “We wanted a town that had great schools” but was also an easy commute to and from New York.
Their two boys attended WW-P schools through middle school before moving on to Princeton Day School. His oldest son is a graduate of Georgetown University and works in New York. His younger son currently attends Villanova.
Hofmann began to get involved in the community when his sons were younger. He was a Little League coach for 10 years. He was asked to join the hospital board seven years ago by Jack Chamberlin, who was its chairman from 2004 to 2007. “It was natural when Jack asked me,” said Hofmann, citing his connections to the hospital and service. “I’m inspired by our leadership.”
As chairman of the board at the healthcare system, Hofmann looks forward to the opportunities associated with the new hospital, located on 50 acres of a 160-acre site in Plainsboro off Route 1. When the new facility opens in late 2011, it will consist of 636,000 square feet of interior space, including 237 single patient rooms, operating rooms, treatment areas, and an emergency department twice the size of the current one.
The new medical center will be located on a campus that will also include a medical office building, a fitness and wellness center, a health education center, a senior residential community, a skilled nursing facility, pediatric services, and a 32-acre public park along the Millstone River.
As a member of the board for the past seven years, Hofmann has seen the process unfold as officials developed plans for the new hospital — from choosing a site and getting the approvals to groundbreaking and beginning construction. “This goes back many years; we visited many sites,” he said. “[The Plainsboro site] worked itself out as being a great location. We want to be in Plainsboro,” he said, citing access to the site as just one of the factors.
“We think that this new site is going to attract many new patients,” he says. “It is in a great location.”
