Rx for Success

As an undergraduate accounting major, Annette Catino worked full time as a pharmacy assistant and commuted to campus from Iselin, New Jersey. Her hard work paid off – just 15 years later she founded QualCare, Inc., an innovative provider of higher-quality, lower-cost health care coverage across New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

“That work ethic helped to prepare me to be a CEO,” she says. So did a summer course she took in health care economics at Montclair State.

“Dr. Gladys Ellenbogen taught that course and opened my eyes to the whole world of health care – to the size of the industry, its prospects for growth and the significant opportunities in it for women,” the QualCare president and CEO recalls. “That one course and that one professor led me to enter the field. My career is a testament to one professor’s ability to impact a student.”

Catino also took courses in the University’s accounting department, crediting this foundation as essential to her success as a CEO. After working in a hospital, Catino founded QualCare in 1991, at a time when New Jersey was deregulating health care.

“As a health care entrepreneur, I seized upon the opportunity to impact the industry,” she says.

Originally under the sponsorship of St. Clare’s-Riverside Medical Center in Denville, New Jersey, QualCare is now owned by 14 of New Jersey’s most prominent health care systems. “These partners make us different from the other health insurers in New Jersey,” she explains. Under her leadership, QualCare has grown into an innovative model for health care coverage in a rapidly evolving industry. Its more than 1,000 employees deliver a lower-cost alternative to commercial health care insurance to a diverse group of more than 800,000 members from both private and public sectors.

“Be passionate and love your work — or don't do it.”

The Affordable Care Act has complicated the industry, but it’s too soon to tell its impact, she says. “It’s made a difference, but I don’t know yet if good or bad – it’s just different.”

An avid golfer, Catino builds her business not only in the office, but also on the golf course. “Business is about relationships and golf helps to build relationships,” she says.

Her work ethic and pioneering vision have earned her industry recognitions that include being named by NJBIZ as one of the 100 Most Powerful People in Business in New Jersey, one of the 50 Most Powerful People in Health Care and the 2011 Executive of the Year.

Yet Catino takes it all in stride, offering a simple prescription for success.

“Be passionate and love your work – or don’t do it,” she says.