RWJ Barnabas Health

Kathleen Jacobs has led the investment function since 2024, when she was appointed the system's first Chief Investment Officer. She previously served as CIO of NYU's endowment, a multi-billion-dollar portfolio widely respected for its long-term performance. Jacobs reports to President and CEO Mark E. Manigan and is tasked with professionalizing the management of the system's financial reserves.

The system maintains a Long-Term Investment Portfolio and a Capital Reserve Fund, both managed from its West Orange, New Jersey headquarters. These pools of capital support the non-profit's operations and capital projects across its network of more than a dozen hospitals. The structure is typical of large health systems that hold substantial financial reserves to fund expansion, weather operating cycles, and support debt covenants.

Yes. The balance sheet includes direct commercial real estate holdings tied to clinical operations, such as the Jack and Sheryl Morris Cancer Center in New Brunswick and the RWJBarnabas Health Family Care & Wellness facility at Monmouth Mall in Eatontown. These are operating assets rather than purely financial real estate investments, blurring the line between a real-estate allocation and the system's own physical plant.

RWJ Barnabas Health and Rutgers University maintain a formal academic health care partnership that integrates clinical care, medical education, and research. Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital in New Brunswick serves as a principal teaching hospital for Rutgers medical students. The partnership positions the system as an academic medical center with access to research pipelines and grant-funded programs.

The RWJBarnabas Health Foundation handles philanthropic fundraising for the system, channeling donor dollars into clinical programs, capital projects, and community health initiatives. The foundation is legally separate from the investment reserves managed by the CIO, though both ultimately support the same non-profit mission. Donor-restricted gifts would not typically commingle with the Long-Term Investment Portfolio.

Jacobs spent over a decade at NYU's endowment, an institution known for sophisticated asset allocation and early adoption of alternative investments. Her arrival in 2024 suggests the health system intends to apply endowment-style portfolio theory to its reserves — diversifying across public equities, fixed income, hedge funds, private equity, and real assets — rather than simply holding cash and investment-grade bonds, which has been the historical norm for many non-profit hospital systems.

RWJ Barnabas Health is the largest academic health care system in New Jersey, with more than a dozen hospitals and hundreds of outpatient sites. While the system does not publicly disclose the size of its investment portfolio, its annual operating revenue runs into the billions — placing it among the largest non-profit health systems in the United States by revenue and making the investment function a material institutional allocator in its own right.