Dr. Timothy J. Babineau, the incoming president of Rhode Island Hospital, was formerly an administrator at the University of Maryland Medical Center.

The Providence Journal Bill Murphy

Dr. Timothy J. Babineau loved his job as an administrator at the University of Maryland Medical Center, and didn’t expect to leave for a long time.

But then the recruiters called, talking about the presidency of Rhode Island Hospital, and everything changed. Babineau, who will take the helm of the state’s largest hospital Oct. 1, said he was drawn to Rhode Island because the hospital has “all the ingredients” to ascend into the top tier nationwide.

“The stars are lining up for greatness,” he said.

Yesterday, Babineau, 48, faced a crowd of hospital employees, reporters and others filling the lobby and leaning over its balconies in the children’s building, as he was introduced as the hospital’s new president and chief executive officer.

“Rhode Island Hospital is an outstanding medical center and I’m really proud to be the newest member of your community,” he told them.

Babineau, a surgeon, frequently used the word “outstanding” to describe the hospital in an interview yesterday, explaining why the position pulled him away from Maryland after barely three years.

He listed the “ingredients” that attracted him and that he said brighten the hospital’s prospects: A strengthening partnership with Brown University’s medical school, which plans to build new headquarters nearby; a leading role in research and training doctors; good relations with the unionized workforce and with physicians; strong financial health (in contrast to most hospitals in the state and many around the country); a “really deep commitment” to patient safety.

In assuming leadership of the sprawling hodgepodge of buildings at Dudley and Eddy streets, in Providence, Babineau will be steering a hospital that is central to the state’s health-care system, its economy and arguably its self-esteem, at a time of change and uncertainty. It is the largest private employer in the state (with 6,500 employees in 2006) and the main teaching hospital for the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Rhode Island Hospital can be a source of pride, as when its researchers — who together pull in some $27 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health — win national attention. And it can be a source of shame, as when its surgeons repeatedly cut into the wrong side of patients’ heads.

A not-for-profit hospital in Providence’s urban core, Rhode Island Hospital offers the most specialized medical care available in the state, but also takes care of tens of thousands of needy and uninsured people who turn to its clinics and emergency rooms when they have nowhere else to go. The hospital had more than 33,000 inpatient visits and 136,000 emergency room visits in 2006.

“Very few families in our region have not been touched by this place,” said Larry Aubin, chairman of the Rhode Island Hospital Board of Trustees. In a recent federal survey, 7 out of 10 patients said they’d definitely recommend Rhode Island Hospital to family and friends.

Babineau sees great potential. For example, Babineau said, in the wake of last year’s wrong-site surgeries, the hospital developed top-notch error-prevention measures that may be adopted statewide.

He says he will focus on three “key themes” –– clinical excellence and patient safety; patient satisfaction; and employee satisfaction and physician partnerships.

“I would like to foster a culture where patients come first and safety and quality is on everyone’s mind,” he said.

Now, the hospital hopes to form the core of an academic medical center within the “new Lifespan” –– the seven-hospital conglomerate that would result from the merger of Rhode Island Hospital’s parent company, Lifespan, and Care New England. That merger still has many hurdles ahead, but Babineau, who worked in an eight-hospital system in Maryland, says the concept “makes a lot of sense.”

Babineau is from Fitchburg, Mass., attended medical school at the University of Massachusetts, trained at the New England Deaconess Hospital, and spent most of his career in Massachusetts. He held numerous administrative positions, as well as working as a surgeon, at Boston Medical Center, before becoming senior vice president and chief medical officer for the University of Maryland Medical Center in 2005.

Babineau no longer practices surgery, although he said he sometimes misses the “wonderful sanctuary” of the operating room. But he believes his 22 years as a practicing doctor enhances his perspective as a hospital administrator. “I know what it means to be shoulder to shoulder with frontline caregivers,” he said.

“I still consider myself a health-care provider. Genetically I’m a health-care provider. Always will be,” said Babineau, whose father is a retired family physician and mother a retired nurse.

Being an administrator, he said, takes caregiving to a “bigger platform.”

Babineau has rented a home in Barrington and said his wife, Mora, is arranging to enroll their two daughters, ages 6 and 4, in schools here.

ffreyer@projo.com