By Joe Pisani
BRIDGEPORT — When William M. Jennings took over at Hartford HealthCare St. Vincent’s Medical Center three years ago, he recalls that if a helicopter was landing at the hospital, it was “to take one of our patients to a higher level of care.”
“Now, when you hear a helicopter landing at St. Vincent’s, almost without variation, it’s somebody coming from somewhere else in Connecticut or New England,” he says, “because we have a higher standard of care, and that has been part of the vision we’ve executed.”
Five years ago, Hartford HealthCare acquired the hospital from Ascension, and since then, Jennings said, the transformation “has raised the standard of healthcare for every resident of Fairfield County.”
How? The Senior Vice President of Hartford HealthCare and President of the Fairfield Region has a healthcare equation, which he says is responsible for the system’s growth and achievement: A2E2, which translates as “Access, Affordability, Equity and Excellence.”
“We have distilled our strategy down to four words,” he says. “More access in a more affordable way.”
Hartford HeathCare has expanded its reach throughout the county and what started as “an isolated community hospital has turned into a comprehensive regional health system.”
Deacon Patrick Toole, chancellor and secretary of the Curia of the Diocese of Bridgeport, serves as Chair of the Hartford HealthCare Board for the Fairfield Region and has expressed his appreciation for the investments the company has made in the county and for their efforts to preserve the Catholic identity of the hospital.
“Bill Jennings and the Hartford HealthCare team are providing an essential service with the highest level of excellence to our community,” he said. “They have invested millions of dollars to open urgent care centers, enhance behavioral health services, and significantly update St. Vincent’s Medical Center with state-of-the-art facilities, all with a patient-centered focus. The doctors, nurses, and staff I’ve met have a deep passion for the mission.”
He also praised Jennings for “outstanding leadership” and said, “Bill not only works tirelessly to deliver premium healthcare services in Fairfield County, but also has shown enormous commitment and compassion to our community.”
Jennings, who joined Hartford HealthCare in July 2021,was previously Executive Vice President for Tower Health, a six-hospital system in Pennsylvania, and President and CEO of Reading Hospital. Prior to that, he had been CEO of Bridgeport Hospital for eight years and an Executive Vice President for Yale New Haven Health.
Jennings points to several measures of growth and excellence that have improved since acquiring the hospital:
St. Vincent’s previously had a CMS quality rating of one out of a possible five stars, based on criteria established by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. Its most recent rating is four stars. The medical center’s Leapfrog score, determined by the nonprofit watchdog organization that measures safety and quality, went from a D to an A.
“These are gold standards nationally,” Jennings said. “Our focus on excellence has moved those two ratings, and the turnaround in quality and safety — which is really the only reason we’re in business — has been profound in a very, very short amount of time. And most of that has been through the high standards that Hartford HealthCare brought to the region from the success they’ve had in other parts of the state.”
During a recent presentation to the staff, Jennings showcased the growth: In 2019, there were 52 primary care providers with 70,371 visits, and by 2023, there were 104 with 223,591 visits; the number of surgeries went from 6,937 to 9463; five urgent care centers with 44,795 visits increased to 12 with 76,963 visits; and ambulatory sites increased from 37 to 110.
During that period, the service area expanded from Bridgeport and several surrounding towns to all of Southern Fairfield County to Stamford, the Valley towns, Orange and West Haven.
“Hartford HealthCare came into the region, and we’ve redefined healthcare in this county by becoming a competitor,” Jennings said. “Competitive disruptive forces improve quality and improve choice. And in our case, we have improved access and affordability.”
Jennings calls some of the new initiatives “uber innovative.”
One is a joint venture with Amazon, whereby Hartford has an exclusive contract to operate “One Medical,” which is the Amazon franchise of concierge primary care offices. There are several in the county and more planned.
“It’s concierge primary care, and it’s immediate access, either by virtual or in person or telephone access to your provider,” he said. “Hartford HealthCare is the subspecialty and the specialty network that supports these offices.”
In addition, they launched OnMed care stations, which are primary care pods that will be coming to Fairfield County this year, with several already deployed around the state.
“It’s a primary care pod, which you can enter and be greeted by a virtual provider, who might be a physician’s assistant or a doctor,” he said. “The pod, for example, could sit in the lobby of a grocery store and be completely private.” Once inside, the patient can be given a remote physical by the provider and receive a prescription if one is needed.
St. Vincent’s also now offers “interventional neurosurgery and vascular thrombectomy.” In simpler terms, he explains: “We recruited two vascular neurosurgeons who specialize in emergency stroke treatment, and now the EMS in our region know that if you’re having a serious stroke, you have to go to St. Vincent’s because we have the equipment and the specialists and the expertise to take care of it.”
Two years ago, the necessary treatment could only be found at Yale or Hartford, he said.
“We’ve saved hundreds of lives just since instituting this new service in our region, which wasn’t available anywhere before,” he said. “We brought in neurosurgeons, who live in the county and are raising their families here.”
Jennings also said St. Vincent’s has “the largest volume cardiac program in the county … and volume matters because the more you do, the safer it is.”
St. Vincent’s recently announced what he calls “the most historic partnership in healthcare in the last 100 years in Fairfield County.” Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center has formed a joint venture partnership with Hartford HealthCare to bring its services here.
“Memorial Sloan Kettering doesn’t do joint ventures anywhere,” he said. “We’re the first ever, and they picked Hartford HealthCare statewide, but they’re starting in Fairfield County so that means our residents, our neighbors, our patients will not have to drive to Manhattan (for many procedures) because we’re putting a dedicated office building at 4185 Black Rock Turnpike in Fairfield, off Exit 44 on the Merritt, which will be our Memorial Sloan Kettering office building.”
St. Vincent’s Medical Center, which is the primary teaching hospital for the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University, has also added three new residencies in psychiatry, family practice and inaugural anesthesia in addition to the existing ones in internal medicine and radiology.
For Jennings, it all comes back to “A2E2,” their formula for success.
“It’s clear that we are raising the standard of care for every resident of Fairfield County by adding new access, and making that more affordable and more equitable by infusing new excellence into the region,” he said.
Deacon Toole said, “I am extremely optimistic for the future of healthcare within our diocese. Our community is blessed to have Bill Jennings leading Hartford HealthCare here. In just a few short years, he has transformed healthcare services within our region.”
