Bill Owen is touring the Cancer Institute of New Jersey in New Brunswick—one segment of the vast domain he oversees as president of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey—when he wanders off for a little side conversation.
His companions are hardly surprised. Owen, a confident and courtly 54-year-old physician, hasn’t followed a straight line since the tour began. Earlier, he veered away to poke his head inside a closed-door meeting of the institute’s directors. Then, as his group rounded a corner, he stopped to read the top sheet of a stack of papers sitting on a copy machine.
Now he is asking Jeanine Wigfall, a clinical service rep at the institute’s two-month-old Stacy Goldstein Breast Cancer Center, if there is anything she needs in order to do her job better.
“Patients say the walls are too sterile. They want something to look at. They want to be distracted,” she says.
“You know, you’re right,” he replies, and instructs an aide to make a note of it.
Two years have passed since William F. Owen Jr. arrived from Tennessee to steady UMDNJ, buffeted by a federal investigation that would eventually conclude the university had squandered more than $400 million in taxpayer money through fraud, waste, no-bid contracts, political abuses, and cronyism.
Before Owen’s appointment, the institution—the nation’s largest health-sciences university, with eight schools on five campuses and a $1.8 billion budget—had been jarred by month after month of turbulence. Owen’s predecessor, John Petillo, had been ousted in February 2006. The dean of the UMDNJ medical school in Camden County was under indictment for arranging a no-show job for a powerful state senator. UMDNJ’s accreditation was in jeopardy. Faculty were fleeing.
UMDNJ had avoided prosecution by agreeing to let a federal monitor investigate its finances. The government’s original criminal complaint had alleged Medicaid fraud, but the monitor’s investigation had seeped into all areas, including medicine. There were, for example, revelations that UMDNJ propped up a faltering heart-surgery program by paying community physicians to send their patients there.
Today, what Owen calls “those dark days” have brightened. The federal monitor is gone. Various reforms and new ethical standards have replaced the old way of doing business. New management teams are running the operation. Parties deemed responsible for past abuses have been prosecuted or purged. UMDNJ has been reaccredited.
“It’s a changed place,” says Robert Del Tufo, one of the reformers. A former U.S. attorney for New Jersey and former state attorney general, he is chairman of the reconstituted UMDNJ board of trustees.
But Owen remains the watchful administrator, eager to walk the halls and let people know he’s paying attention. He may also be the institution’s chief defender. While he does not minimize its past sins, he insists they were not unique to UMDNJ.
“I have not seen anything here that has not been an occurrence elsewhere,” he says. “Patronage is not unique. A failure to follow bidding rules is not unique. Overbilling is not unique. What was unique, for me, was the press coverage, and the zeal with which these infractions were highlighted.”
Before coming to New Jersey, Owen was chancellor of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center. The son of college-educated parents, he grew up in still-segregated Memphis but was sent to boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1969, the year after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Owen’s hometown.
He earned his bachelor’s degree from Brown University and his medical degree from Tufts University, then spent twelve years as a staff physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Owen had an academic career at Harvard Medical School and Duke University. He was also a research scientist for Baxter Healthcare Corp. A kidney specialist, he last practiced medicine at Duke in 2004.
Owen lives in South Orange with his wife, Alice, a former hospital administrator. They have two children, ages 18 and 22. With an annual salary of $570,000 and three years left on his contract, Owen says his goals are to lead UMDNJ into the top tier of universities nationally, provide outstanding patient care at its three teaching hospitals, and bring financial stability to UMDNJ’s University Hospital in Newark. During an interview with New Jersey Monthly, he talked about the challenge.
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Q. What did you know about UMDNJ before Bob Del Tufo called and asked you to join the search committee for a new president?
A. I’d heard about it in the lay press and from peers in [academia]. There was a lot of conversation about UMDNJ and some of its challenges in maintaining accreditation. I certainly remember knowing the university was embroiled in violations of the Stark law [a federal statute governing payments to physicians] over the cardiology program.
Q. Shortly after joining the search committee, you asked to be considered for the presidency yourself. Why?
A. I was attracted to the unfulfilled opportunity this organization had. It was a large, relatively well-resourced organization with an awful lot of talent. Many academic health centers had undergone the same sort of challenges and overcome them. One could import solutions. And its educational component had not been damaged at all.
Q. At the time you came, the university was in turmoil. What did you do on the first day?
A. After identifying where the cafeteria and the washroom were, I started talking to people. I talked to as many people as I could. I’m a scientist. I certainly had testable hypotheses going into this.
Q. Six weeks later, you had a stroke and spent two weeks at UMDNJ-University Hospital in Newark recovering. How did you end up there?
A. I knew I was having a stroke and told my wife, “Alice, drive me to University Hospital” because they had a stroke interventional center. It was a very humbling and important experience, to be the care receiver. It was the first time I was, in a serious way, a patient. I heard the noise of the ICU and overheard troubled conversations with families. I also experienced the warmth of having someone hold your hand and say, “You’re going to be okay.”
Q. Did you fully recover?
A. I am about 95 percent recovered. I have a limp.
Q. In an interview you said the university was subjected to “the equivalent of a multimillion dollar negative advertising campaign.” Have you been able to counter it?
A. I have been actively trying. Press coverage was accurate in many ways but focused on the negative aspects of the organization alone. We have a communications staff that is tasked with messaging what is occurring. We’re talking about the things the university does very well.
Q. Has anyone, from the governor’s office on down, tried to exert influence on UMDNJ or tried to get a job for a friend or relative?
A. With me personally, absolutely not. Or I didn’t recognize it. So far as others are concerned, I honestly don’t know. Certainly, if someone wanted to try to exert influence, they’re entitled to do that. That in itself is not illegal. What’s illegal is responding to it favorably.
Q. When the federal monitor ended his oversight, he handed over to UMDNJ 42 incomplete investigations of alleged misconduct. What’s happened with those?
A. We’re just about completing wrapping up with those.
Q. Will you recommend any for criminal prosecution?
A. I’m not at liberty to say.
Q. Earlier this year, in a draconian budget environment, the state Legislature increased spending for UMDNJ by $31 million. Did you interpret that as a sign that legislators believe the university has put the past behind it?
A. I think it was a strong endorsement that this is as much a changed place as one can find.
Q. Are UMDNJ’s troubles really over?
A. Past behaviors are behind us. Transforming a reputation takes years. I can understand why some people would be skeptical, especially if they don’t have close proximity to the organization. But it is a much-changed place. We have shown we are good stewards.
Q. Nowhere in this discussion have we touched on the quality of medical education at UMDNJ. How do New Jersey Medical School in Newark and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick rank, compared to other medical schools?
A. They are both outstanding. Our kids do very, very well on their test scores, and they’re highly sought after by some of the top programs in the country. Our School of Osteopathic Medicine in Stratford has a geriatric program that is ranked in the top ten of the United States.
Q. You have said UMDNJ deserves recognition for the things it does well. Can you tick some off?
A. Sure. Let me give you a clinical example. We’re tops in the U.S. in neurosurgery, especially in terms of spinal surgery. Ophthalmology. Ear, nose, and throat. Urology. That’s a non-inclusive list, by the way. Let me go to other end—research—and get real basic. We are doing research into drug-resistant tuberculosis and research into the mechanisms at play for the metastasis of breast cancer. Research into the genes associated with multiple sclerosis and the proteins associated with Alzheimer’s. Again, a non-inclusive list.
Q. Your job must wear you out. What do you do to relax?
A. I go home and listen to music or read a book. One of my passions is astronomy. Jupiter was out two days ago. I saw it with the naked eye. It was gorgeous. I also have a new motorcycle, a custom chopper, which I had built in Florida. I haven’t been out on a road trip yet. It’s in the garage, where I can look at it and keep it polished. It has my wife’s picture on it.
Mary Jo Patterson is a freelance reporter living in New Jersey.