Southern Ocean Medical Center: Providing Health Care Close to Home for our Growing Community

By Michele Morrison, MPH, BSHA, RN
President/Chief Hospital Executive
Hackensack Meridian Southern Ocean Medical Center

I am excited to share the latest advances and future plans for Hackensack Meridian Southern Ocean Medical Center (SOMC), your community hospital, right here in Manahawkin. Our 176-bed center is dedicated to medical excellence, offering the services of nearly 500 physicians and 1,050 team members, including 316 nurses. Our mission is to deliver the most advanced inpatient and outpatient health care today and plan for the future health care needs of the people we serve.

More than 600,000 people live in Ocean County. As of 2020, the population increased by 10.5 percent when compared to the 2010 census, reflecting a population growth of almost 13 percent. SOMC is taking the lead by investing in technology and facility expansions that will meet future health challenges as our community continues to grow.

We spent much of 2022 building our orthopedics program and are in a strong position to support all of your orthopedics needs related to hip, knee, shoulder, elbow, hand and foot conditions. We welcomed several new orthopedic surgeons to our medical staff: Jason Wong, D.O., Roman Ashmyan, D.O., and James Doran, M.D., who joined our existing team of experts.

One of the most important and enjoyable parts of my role is to recruit top-notch physicians to SOMC. The clinical leadership team and I are fully committed to expanding physician expertise to increase the scope of specialty care available close to home. Recently, we added two colorectal surgeons, Michael Del Rosario, M.D. and Michael Caparelli, M.D., and urologist Scott Wheeler, M.D., to complement our roster of experts in more than 40 medical specialties.

One of our key areas of growth at SOMC is heart and vascular health. Looking toward the future, a recent study projected that rates of cardiovascular risk factors and disease will increase significantly in the decades ahead. Last year, SOMC was fully licensed by the New Jersey Department of Health to provide diagnostic cardiac catheterization. This procedure is used to diagnose angina, heart failure, and heart valve disease to determine if treatment is needed - either through medication, angioplasty, minimally invasive structural repair or open-heart surgery. So far, we have seen 468 patients.

Our goal is to provide outstanding cardiovascular health care services for the long-term. SOMC added a leading-edge angiography imaging system, the GE Innova IGS 540, to the medical center’s vascular, cardiac, and interventional radiology services. This system accurately diagnoses heart, artery and valve diseases. We have worked diligently to make sure that SOMC provides the very best cardiac diagnostic testing and a comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation program. The expansion of diagnostics will provide the community with an even more complete cardiovascular program.

Our freestanding Vascular Surgery and Vein Center, located on Nautilus Drive adjacent to the hospital, provides specialized care and expert diagnosis of arterial and venous disease.

Cancer is the second leading cause of death (after heart disease) in New Jersey. As a medical center, we must be focused on preventing and treating cancer. Our Cancer Center provides a single destination for multidisciplinary cancer treatment and advanced radiation therapies. We are committed to providing treatment based on the latest medical advances, and we are able to offer investigational therapies that could possibly be more effective than existing treatments.

In addition to all of the developments that I have discussed, we are investing $24.9 million in the expansion of our surgical services. The project includes five new state-of-the-art operating rooms combined with pre- and post-surgical areas, as well as the expansion of our Sterilized Processing Department (SPD). The project will take approximately 30 months to complete.

Our patients have access to both open and robotic-assisted surgery for general, bariatric, colorectal, urogynecology, thoracic and urology procedures. Our Robotic-Assisted Surgery program has grown tremendously since our acquisition of the da Vinci Xi® Surgical System in June 2022. To date, we have completed 904 robotic-assisted surgery cases and are hoping to complete 1,000 cases by this summer. Our robotics program has experienced so much growth that we added another robotic surgical system in March 2023 - allowing us to offer leading-edge surgical treatment to even more patients.

We are also working to add 20 new acute-care beds and to achieve a Level 2 maternity designation, which includes moderate- to high-risk specialty care.

And to further expand the services available at SOMC, the Hackensack Meridian Health network connects our patients to a comprehensive range of leading-edge technologies, treatments and clinical trials, right here in New Jersey.

I’m proud to say that our work has been recognized nationally by nursing and medical organizations. The nursing team has been re-accredited for Magnet® status in 2022, the nation’s highest honor of nursing excellence for nursing practice, quality and safety in patient care. U.S. News & World Report ranked the medical center as high performing in the treatment of kidney failure, chronic obstructive disease (COPD), heart failure and stroke. We were recently re-accredited by the Joint Commision for disease specific stroke care, and our bariatric program for obesity achieved recognition by the American College of Surgeons as the most comprehensive bariatric surgery program in the region.

I had the honor of celebrating SOMC's 50th anniversary last September. More than 300 families and community members attended the carnival-inspired event, and I so enjoyed the opportunity to listen to and gain insights from our guests. It’s important for me on both a personal and professional level to hear first-hand the medical challenges that people in our community face and how they are coping and addressing their health care needs. The experience further strengthened my commitment to SOMC and to the people of southern Ocean County.

As I conclude this update to the community, I want to emphasize my deep personal and professional commitment to the people of southern Ocean County. My team at Hackensack Meridian Southern Ocean Medical Center works tirelessly day and night to meet the health care needs of our growing community, and to plan for the health care challenges of the future. From cardiology to cancer care to orthopedics and beyond, we are investing in the latest technologies and talent required to deliver outstanding health care for you, now and in the future. I look forward to providing more updates as we continue to realize our strategic plans to keep southern Ocean County healthy! Until then, be well!

For more information, visit HackensackMeridianHealth.org/SOMC. To find a doctor, go to 1-844-HMH-WELL.