Filipino-American Club of the Jersey Shore, Monmouth County, New Jersey, filamorg.com

Ninfa Medina Saunders, executive vice president and chief operating officer for health services of South Jersey’s largest healthcare system, the Virtua Health for six years, is among the top 100 votegetters out of more than 25,700 nominations in the eighth annual 100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare award initiated by the US-based Modern HealthCare Magazine.

Also included in the nomination list are US Senate majority leader Harry Reid, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger; Google chairman and chief executive officer Eric Schmidt; Newt Gingrich, founder of the Washington-based Center for Health Transformation; Nancy Ann de Parle, director of the White House Office of Healthcare Reform; and US Attorney General Eric Holder, “I was quite surprised and humbled to be nominated among so many formidable healthcare leaders in the country. I have always done the things I do because they are the right things to do and because it added value to the organization and the community at large. Never once did it cross my mind that what I am doing would bring such attention because it was never intended for self aggrandizement,” Saunders, who has been in clinical nursing and hospital administration for more than 30 years, said in an email to the Manila Bulletin.

The Filipina health care executive, who is in her 50s and hails from Oriental Mindoro, believed that her leadership in Virtua, which under her tenure, has become top 1 health care system in the US in six consecutive years, factored in her nomination.

As Virtua’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, she oversees its four acute care hospitals, a converted acute care hospital serving as an large outpatient facility with an emergency room, two rehab hospitals, two freestanding ambulatory surgery centers, and its home health service, fitness center, and physician practices.

Under her watch, Virtua became the silver award recipient of the New Jersey Governor’s Award for Quality two years in a row in 2005 and 2007, respectively and was named as Top 1 and Best Place to Work in the Delaware Valley area, also two years in a row in 2006 and 2007.

Saunders also successfully led Virtua to “best in class” financial recovery, from a negative margin in 2003, which prompted it to rank as 48th in New Jersey for operating margin performance to an 11.62 percent operating margin in 2007 which made it the top healthcare system from 2004 up to present.

Aside from her outstanding hospital administration, she attributed the recent recognition to more than two-decade old service as a “mentor to up and coming healthcare leaders.”

“A number of top executives in the country have been my students,” Saunders, whose latest research and some of her publications have been considered “pioneer work” in healthcare, noted.

In 2008, she was named as visiting scholar and faculty at the New York-based General Electric and NCHL Advance Leadership Academy, which is one of the largest and most successful worldwide corporation in the US, a year after her appointment as visiting scholar at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.

She has also been teaching at various universities in the US, including University Sciences of Pennsylvania; Jefferson University’s College of Health Professionals in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and Emory University’s Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing in Atlanta, Georgia.

Saunders said thousands of Filipino nurses and medical professionals remain as significant part of the US healthcare industry. “Filipinos in the healthcare field continue to be regarded in high esteem both for their clinical competence and strong work habits,” she noted.

“My advice for Filipinos planning to migrate and practice in the US: Continue to sharpen your clinical skills, be flexible in the field that you plan to practice and pursue advancing competencies in a number of specialties.

Geriatrics in particular will become the fastest growing segment of the population,” Saunders said.

Meanwhile, she said the current health crisis brought about by the A(H1N1) virus has caught Washington’s attention “in such a dramatic way,” as she maintained that the strain did not in any way paralyze the operations of the US industries. “While the reaction to AH1N1 was swift and impressive, this AH1N1 strain did not pose as much threat as originally expected. There are but a few cases now being identified and where they were identified mortality was not an issue at all,” she noted.

Aside from her active participation in helping out the US government in mapping out healthcare reforms, she has also been doing community and charitable work outside of her professional work in the US and in the Philippines. In October, she is expected to lead a medical mission in the Philippines.

Before joining in Virtua, Saunders served as a policy staff of former governor Roy Barnes’ Georgia Cancer Coalition from 2002 to 2003 which develops regional centers of excellence for cancer prevention, detection, treatment and research utilizing funds from the tobacco settlement.

It was in the intensive care unit of Riley Memorial Hospital in the Meridian city of Mississippi where her 37 years of career in the healthcare industry started. She served as staff nurse from 1972 to 1974 after she earned a Bachelor of Science in Nursing summa cum laude from Concordia College in Manila.

Saunders pursued her studies in nursing and completed her Masters at the Rutgers University, Newark, New Jersey, summa cum laude in 1979, five years before she earned her Masters in Business Administration in Emory University in 1984 where she graduated magna cum laude.

She completed her Doctorate in Healthcare Administration summa cum laude at the Medical University of South Carolina."