Mount Sinai Science & Medicine 2015 Fall

MOUNT SINAI SCIENCE & MEDICINE

MOUNT SINAI SCIENCE

PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

MOUNT SINAI HEALTH SYSTEM

Kenneth L. Davis, MD

ANNE AND JOEL EHRENKRANZ DEAN, ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI PRESIDENT FOR ACADEMIC AFFAIRS, MOUNT SINAI HEALTH SYSTEM

Dennis S. Charney, MD

CHIEF DEVELOPMENT OFFICER

SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT FOR DEVELOPMENT

MOUNT SINAI HEALTH SYSTEM

Mark Kostegan, FAHP

EDITOR

Celia M. Regan

MANAGING EDITOR

Deborah Schupack

ASSISTANT EDITORS

Anna Horton

Vanesa Sarić

CONTRIBUTORS

Alison Dalton

Chris Dent

Don Hamerman

Kyle Hilton

Andrew Lichtenstein

Sima Rabinowitz

Julia Rothman

Katie Quackenbush Spiegel

DESIGN

Taylor Design

Mount Sinai Science & Medicine is published twice annually by the Office of Development, Mount Sinai Health System, for an audience of friends and alumni. We welcome your comments; please contact us at a magazine@mountsinai.org or call us at (212) 659-8500. Visit us on the Web at philanthropy.mountsinai.org

36

15

ABOUT THE COVER

The Mount Sinai Health System not only reaches millions of New Yorkers in all five boroughs—the influence of its research and innovations extends far beyond the City.

Medicine 360°

Three hundred sixty degrees—literally, a plane curve everywhere equidistant from a given fixed point, the center. For the Mount Sinai Health System, that center is the patient, whose experience is shaped by the high quality of care for which we are known. That care now extends throughout the five boroughs and key locations beyond.

In this issue, we showcase the Mount Sinai Health System at work, including a dramatic look at the range of care that goes on in any given day across the city. We unveil how our seven hospitals and the Icahn School of Medicine are moving forward to meet the evolving health needs of the remarkably diverse communities they serve and elevate the patient experience. And we take you on a 22-mile ride to experience “Medical Education 360,” preparing the next generation of physicians and scientists to meet the wide range of care needs in New York City, which is essentially a microcosm of the world.

MESSAGE

02 The Power of the System

NEWS

05 NCI-designation for Tisch Cancer Institute + Mount Sinai rises in the rankings + New global health director + “Most Wired” + Dr. Nestler to lead Society for Neuroscience + Notable IBD awards + Advancing Telehealth + Aspen Ideas Festival + New stroke-preventing implant + Major stem cell grant + Ascendant Kravis Children’s Hospital + iPhone helps asthma sufferers

FACULTY

10 Spotlight on recent recruits + The latest honors and recognition + Researchers investigate whole genome assembly, targeted melanoma therapies, antibiotic resistance, microbial diversity in the Amazon, a stem cell disease model, eczema, neurological diseases, and hospice benefits for survivors

50 Celebrating generous philanthropic partners + Transformational gifts to create centers and institutes for Alzheimer’s disease, global health, palliative care, cardiovascular health, precision wellness, and ambulatory surgery

57 Profiles: Joan Reede ISMMS ’80, Jeremy Abramson ISMMS ’00 + Reunion 2015 + The importance of scholarships

Each hospital strategizes its unique role in the community and in the Health System, today and into the future.

A bird’s eye view of our integrated, citywide system of care.

Photo essay: The Mount Sinai Health System—which cares for 2.5+ million people—in action.

Mapping the future of medical education.

Driving quality and safety to a new level of excellence. Plus, a conversation with Mount Sinai’s first Chief Patient Experience Officer.

A new series on seamless care throughout the City.

Medicine 360˚

A CONVERSATION BETWEEN and Dennis S.

Kenneth L. Davis, MD President and Chief Executive Officer

Charney, MD

Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School

DR. DAVIS: We created the Mount Sinai Health System for a number of mutually beneficial reasons. As I have talked about before in these pages, the macroeconomics of health care are changing. Traditional fee-for-service medicine is on the way out, and population management, with hospitals accepting risk, is on the way in. So we must become more efficient, provide better quality, and do it at a lower cost. That means we have to change the way we perform health care, increasing primary care and making sure it reaches deep into the neighborhoods where our patients live.

The new Health System increases Mount Sinai’s footprint from that of a local area to the entire island of Manhattan and beyond. There is now a Mount Sinai doctor within walking distance of almost any community in Manhattan and within easy reach by

public transportation of any neighborhood in the five boroughs and important suburban outposts. This means we are able to manage populations and position Mount Sinai for what the future of health care is going to look like.

DR. CHARNEY: The changing economics make it more incumbent upon us than ever to maintain our core social values: taking care of the health needs of the communities that we live in and serve.

A high percentage—more than sixty percent—of our business are Medicaid patients and Medicare patients. We take care of the most diverse population of patients in the United States—some forty different ethnic groups from every country on the planet, the richest and poorest ZIP codes in America, every disease.

DR. DAVIS: Yes—our patients represent the full picture of New York.

DR. CHARNEY: It's truly medicine 360 degrees. We don't just take care of highmargin patients. We don't just take care of complex orthopedics or complex cancer at the exclusion of obstetrics, pediatrics, behavioral health, and lots of routine medical care.

DR. DAVIS: So, what do you do if you are a socially conscious provider of care in a community that needs all those services but the economics of health care are forcing you to make very difficult decisions about rationing that care, diminishing the kind of care that you provide?

DR. CHARNEY: The Mount Sinai Health System is the answer. The larger system

means we can operate much more efficiently while fulfilling our social mission.

DR. DAVIS: We do this in two key ways. First, we consolidate our back office expenses—human resources, IT, billing, compliance—so we have less overhead and can invest more in clinical services. Secondly, because some of our hospitals are close to one another, we can streamline certain services and avoid costly duplication.

DR. CHARNEY: For instance, we don't need pediatric ICUs, which are very expensive, in every Mount Sinai hospital.

DR. DAVIS: Yes. Instead, we are creating an integrated health care system with centers of excellence in each of our hospitals. The Mount Sinai Hospital, with

“The new Health System increases Mount Sinai’s footprint from that of a local area to the entire island of Manhattan and beyond.”

– Dr. Kenneth L. Davis

“When you’re an institution like ours, where the hospital and the medical school are so intertwined and there is no university in between, you can focus wholly on health and making people well.”

– Dr. Dennis S. Charney

its robust ICUs, will remain a place for more of the complex care. Mount Sinai St. Luke's has expertise in behavioral health, as well as a cardiothoracic area that we are investing in. Mount Sinai Roosevelt offers excellence in orthopaedics, and Mount Sinai Beth Israel in neurosciences.

DR. CHARNEY: And there’s another way this functions so well. The Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai works hand in glove with the System leadership to build these centers of excellence and deliver high quality care in the community. The School is playing an integral role, for instance, in the diabetes centers of excellence at Mount Sinai St. Luke's and Mount Sinai Beth Israel. We are working together to recruit and retain the top cardiothoracic surgeons to provide care at The Mount Sinai Hospital, as well as Beth Israel and St. Luke’s. And because leadership in the School of Medicine spans the entire System—the chair of medicine, for example, is chair for the entire System, with local leadership reporting up to the System chair—we are all moving together towards a unified vision.

DR. DAVIS: Our unique structure is a distinct advantage in a number of ways. Unlike the university model, Mount Sinai has a single Board of Trustees for the medical school and the hospitals—and this gives us the ability not only to formulate that unified vision but also to rapidly drive discoveries from lab to patient. To all patients, because we never forget that our mission is to serve the communities in which we live.

DR. CHARNEY: This is one of the very few places in the United States where a single top-flight medical school forms the foundation for outstanding clinical care across the full range of diseases, ethnic

groups, cultures and languages, and socioeconomic class. The relationship is synergistic. Our large, diverse patient base enables us to attract the very best doctors and researchers in the world. It also draws the best and brightest students to us because they get such a rich and wideranging training experience.

Similarly, we attract outstanding researchers who benefit from such a varied and voluminous patient population. In turn, the groundbreaking discoveries here provide Mount Sinai patients access to the very latest new treatments for the most serious diseases.

DR. DAVIS: The collaboration between the School of Medicine and the rest of the Health System advances our key missions: providing extraordinary care; conducting research that is changing the lives of our patients; and educating the next generations of leaders in health care.

DR. CHARNEY: When you're an institution like ours, where the hospital and the medical school are so intertwined and there is no university in between, you can focus wholly on health and making people well, on why patients come through our doors, why the ambulances are pulling up. Across the Health System, health and wellness, disease and its pathophysiology, diagnosis, treatment, and prevention stare you in the face every day.

DR. DAVIS: The demographics of the people we care for, combined with our governance, really make us incomparable. It produces challenges and opportunities, but it gives us a sense of our mission. That is why you see so many people dedicating their lives to Mount Sinai.

Tisch Cancer Institute Earns National Cancer Institute Designation

The Tisch Cancer Institute (TCI) at the Icahn School of Medicine has been named a National Cancer Institute (NCI)-designated cancer center. TCI joins an elite group of 69 cancer institutions nationwide that have earned this designation, which is based on scientific excellence, robust clinical research, and beneficial community impact.

The designation includes a five-year, $8.5 million grant that will support research programs, recruitment of top academic researchers, and enhancements in community engagement. The funding complements $79 million in current cancer research grants earned by TCI investigators.

“The NCI designation recognizes our deep commitment to advance the field of cancer research, treatment, and prevention, and to bring these innovations to cancer patients and their families,” said Steven Burakoff, MD, Lillian and Henry M. Stratton Professor of Cancer Medicine and Director of The Tisch Cancer Institute. “The designation reflects Mount Sinai’s significant investment in cancer research, world-class faculty, and cutting-edge facilities.”

“Through Dr. Burakoff’s leadership, Mount Sinai has become a national leader in basic, clinical, and population cancer research and treatment,” said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer. “The strengths in research that were central to our NCI designation include harnessing the immune system to attack cancer cells, studying the impact of environmental toxins on cancer, understanding liver cancer biology, and, based on our unique New York ethnic communities, studying the genetic differences and care disparities that drive greater cancer risk in some patients.”

In meeting the rigorous standards of the NCI designation, TCI completed a competitive review process. The Institute demonstrated its innovative and comprehensive research into the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cancer, as well as its commitment to the community through informational programs,

education, and outreach. The NCI commended TCI’s strengths in basic science, clinical research, and community-based outreach.

“The Tisch Cancer Institute reflects a vital trend seen in recent years: real world, complex medical problems being solved by teams that successfully integrate many disciplines,” noted Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School. “The NCI designation is based on our excep-

tional leadership, extensive research facilities, and an institution-wide commitment to research, including a focus on the role of genetics, obesity, and diabetes in cancer. The NCI designation will facilitate expansion of novel treatment options and clinical trials for patients throughout the Mount Sinai Health System.”

The Tisch Cancer Institute was established in 2008 through the generosity of Mount Sinai Trustee James S. Tisch and his wife, Merryl. Mount Sinai’s commitment to cancer research and Dr. Burakoff’s vision to create the infrastructure, reporting mechanisms, and shared resources were critical to the new NCI designation.

Mount Sinai Advances in U.S. News & World Report Rankings

Seven departments at The Mount Sinai Hospital and one at the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai (NYEE) ranked in the Top 25 in this year’s U.S. News & World Report “Best Hospitals” issue. The Mount Sinai Hospital was ranked third in the New York Metro Area.

Led by Cardiology/Heart Surgery (ranked No. 7, up from No. 10 in 2014), four of the Hospital’s Top 25 departments improved their rankings: Gastroenterology/GI Surgery (No. 8, up from No. 9), Neurology/Neurosurgery (No. 14, up from No. 15), and Nephrology (No. 23, up from No. 47).

Sinai Hospital ranked in the nation’s Top 25 were Geriatrics (No. 3), Diabetes & Endocrinology (No. 21), and Ear, Nose & Throat (No. 23). NYEE’s Ophthalmology department made the Top 25 this year, ranking No. 11.

DEPARTMENTS IN THE TOP 25

“We are extremely proud of the staff of The Mount Sinai Hospital, who continue to demonstrate their unwavering commitment to delivering quality, safety, and superior service in treating patients within our community and beyond,” said David L. Reich, MD, President and CEO of The Mount Sinai Hospital and Horace W. Goldsmith Professor of Anesthesiology.

Dr.

Eric J. Nestler to Lead Society for Neuroscience

The other departments at The Mount

New Director of the Arnhold Global Health Institute

See pg. 9 for more about the rankings.

Renowned global health expert Prabhjot Singh, PhD, MD, has been named director of the Icahn School of Medicine’s Arnhold Global Health Institute, which is dedicated to improving health worldwide through research, education, and clinical care partnerships.

Dr. Singh will devise and lead high-potential global and domestic health activities across the School and the Health System. Recruited to Mount Sinai from Columbia University, Dr. Singh has also been named Vice Chair of Population Health in the Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine.

“Dr. Singh’s far-reaching activities, including work as Chair of the One Million Community Health Workers Campaign with the African Union and the United Nations, as well as his development of Harlem-based City Health Works, make him well suited to lead Mount Sinai efforts to improve health care for underserved populations at home and abroad,” said Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine. “His unique experience will advance the Institute’s mission to create sustainable infrastructures and solutions that combat health crises and diseases.”

Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, Nash Family Professor and Chair of the Department of Neuroscience and Director of the Friedman Brain Institute, has been named president-elect of the Society for Neuroscience, the world’s largest organization of brain and nervous system scientists and physicians. Dr. Nestler’s research focuses on the neurobiological basis of drug addiction and depression. His laboratory, which is funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute of Mental Health, and the Hope for Depression Research Foundation, has pioneered studies to understand, at the molecular level, how drugs of abuse and stress change nerve cells and their brain circuits to cause behavioral abnormalities and to use this knowledge to develop improved treatments.

Mount Sinai Is “Most Wired™”

In recognition of its innovative use of information technology to improve value-based health care, the Mount Sinai Health System was named a 2015 “Most Wired™” organization by the American Hospital Association and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. Mount Sinai—the only academic medical center so honored in New York City—was lauded for its implementation of IT initiatives in the areas of infrastructure, quality, safety, and clinical integration.

“Information technology is a key component of improving the patient experience and helping to ensure good patient outcomes,” says President Kenneth L. Davis, MD. “From bedside apps for our inpatients to remote consults and other services via our Telehealth offerings, innovation in IT makes the change from fee-for-service health care to population health management possible.

We congratulate our IT staff on a job truly well done.”

Mount Sinai invests in its electronic health record systems, facilitates communication between patients and providers, creates platforms to better connect clinicians across multiple facilities, and leverages new technologies.

AWARD WINNERS

MOUNT SINAI RESEARCHERS WIN THREE MAJOR IBD ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS

In a historic achievement, three researchers from The Mount Sinai Hospital won all the scientific achievement awards from the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation of America in a single year. “This is the first time in the history of the award that all three winners are from the same medical institution,” said Marjorie Merrick, Vice President of Research Special Projects at the Foundation. “And it seems quite fitting that they all are from Mount Sinai, where Crohn’s disease was first described by Dr. Burrill B. Crohn, a Mount Sinai physician, and where groundbreaking research and treatment for Crohn’s continues today.”

HENRY D. JANOWITZ LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD IN IBD

DAVID B. SACHAR, MD,

Clinical Professor of Medicine and Director Emeritus of the Dr. Henry D. Janowitz Division of Gastroenterology in the Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine. Dr. Sachar was the School’s first Dr. Burrill B. Crohn Professor of Medicine and has published more than 260 articles on IBD.

SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT IN IBD CLINICAL RESEARCH

JEAN-FRÉDÉRIC COLOMBEL, MD, Professor of Medicine and Director of The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust inflammatory Bowel Disease Center.

SCIENTIFIC ACHIEVEMENT IN BASIC IBD RESEARCH

JUDY H. CHO, MD, Ward-Coleman Professor of Translational Genetics and Medicine, Vice-Chair of Translational Genetics, Associate Chief for Research in the Dr. Henry D. Janowitz Division of Gastroenterology, and Director of CePORTED. She is the first woman to win this award.

Amplifying the Human Connection through Technology

Using secure digital conferencing technology, patients can now manage their health, meet with physicians, and receive advice from Mount Sinai Health System experts—all without setting foot in a doctor’s office. These initiatives are part of Mount Sinai’s growing Telehealth offerings, which help provide comprehensive, cost-effective care through the use of technology.

“Technology has evolved to a point where it is less of a novelty in our doctors’ offices and more of an essential part of our physicians’ toolkits—and, indeed, an everyday part of our patients’ lives,” says Kumar Chatani, Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer. “The time has come for Telehealth to move to the next level by putting it into wider practice, and we’re proud to have done that here at Mount Sinai, which is at the forefront of the Telehealth revolution.”

The Primary Care Program allows patients and their primary care physicians to hold “virtual” appointments or videoconferences for non-urgent follow-up visits. It is expected to particularly benefit patients with chronic illnesses who require medical management. Another Telehealth initiative connects stroke care providers from different locations, to conference in real time when seconds count. And a third program enables patients from rural Upstate New York to consult directly with Mount Sinai Health System pediatric epilepsy specialists.

Aspen Ideas Festival: Dr. Davis on ‘Big Data’

Health care systems and genomics projects have generated massive patient data sets for years—and now the ability of the medical field to use this “Big Data” to improve health and cut costs is on the horizon, predicts President Kenneth L. Davis, MD. Within two decades, he believes, physicians will have these new capabilities, preventing disease to dramatically “bend the cost curve” in medicine.

Dr. Davis was speaking at the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival, an annual global exchange of ideas presented by the Aspen Institute and The Atlantic, which convenes thoughtleaders to the Colorado town to speak on issues that inspire them. “The mapping of the human genome has given us the ability to see trends quickly, and combining that with the electronic medical record, we can see patterns in genes, or systems of genes, related to disease risk and treatment choices that we have never been able to see before,” said Dr. Davis. “We are in a brave new world where new tests, apps, and devices can predict illness before it happens,” and in real time, often before a patient leaves the doctor’s office.

He also spoke on “Providing a Social Safety Net”; on the 21st Century Cures Act, which calls for the appropriation of National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding for biomedical research; and on “The Power and Importance of Failure in Business.”

Other Mount Sinai panelists included Brian Koll, MD, Executive Director for Infection Prevention and Control for the Mount Sinai Health System and Professor of Medicine for the Icahn School; and Eric Nestler, MD, PhD, Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience and Director, Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine.

Mount Sinai First in the East to Implant Stroke-Preventing Device

In March, Mount Sinai experts became the first in the Eastern United States to implant a newly FDA-approved device that prevents stroke in patients with atrial fibrillation. Patients with the condition have a five times greater risk of stroke, and a greater chance of having a more serious stroke. The WATCHMAN device, the size of a quarter and shaped like a parachute, is implanted into the heart to close off the left-atrial appendage, where blood clots can form, travel to the brain, and cause strokes. In a procedure led by Vivek Reddy, MD, Director of Mount Sinai’s Arrhythmia Services, the device is inserted into the heart through a vein in the leg during a minimally invasive, catheter-based procedure.

Grant Moves Stem Cell Research to Clinical Trials

An $8.8 million grant from the New York State Stem Cell Science Program (NYSTEM) will accelerate efforts by the Icahn School to develop new stem cell-based treatments for chemotherapy-resistant blood cancer and other genetic blood disorders. The grant is expected to advance ongoing research efforts that seek to increase the number of stem cells in cord blood collections.

“We are grateful to NYSTEM for providing a unique opportunity to move our discoveries in the laboratory to a clinical setting.”

Blood stem cell transplantation is the only potential therapy available for most patients with blood cancers. To obtain blood stem cells for transplant, doctors use cord blood collections, which contain only limited numbers of stem cells. Mount Sinai researchers have developed a method to increase the number of collected stem cells 35-fold. The grant will move this research ahead to clinical trials in collaboration with biotechnology firms NeoStem and AllCells, leaders in cellular therapy.

“We are grateful to NYSTEM for providing a unique opportunity to move our discoveries in the laboratory to a clinical setting,” said Ronald Hoffman, MD, who heads the project and is Albert A. and Vera G. List Professor of Medicine, Hematology and Medical Oncology, Professor of Gene and Cell Medicine, and Director of the Myeloproliferative Disorders Research Program. “We are able to build upon 30 years of work to develop new treatment options for our patients.”

Kravis Children’s Hospital Rises in U.S. News & World Report Rankings

The Kravis Children's Hospital at Mount Sinai ranked again among the country’s top children’s hospitals in pediatric specialties, according to the U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Children’s Hospitals” for 2015–2016.

The Hospital made significant gains, ranking in seven of ten specialties tracked, and achieving for the first time top 20 rankings in Pulmonology and Nephrology. “Our goal is simply to ensure that each child receives the best care available,” says Lisa Satlin, MD, System Chair of Pediatrics. “Our compassionate staff provides superior, family-centered care and guidance to all of our young patients.”

The Kravis Children’s Hospital, which manages more than 70,000 outpatient visits and 3,000 inpatient stays each year, ranked in the following specialties: Pulmonology, 18th; Nephrology, 19th; Gastroenterology & GI Surgery, 25th; Neurology & Neurosurgery, 25th; Urology, 34th; Diabetes & Endocrinology, 36th; Cancer, 50th.

For Asthma Sufferers: iPhone as Health Tool

The Icahn School is partnering with LifeMap Solutions to launch a large-scale medical research study to make it easy for individuals who suffer from asthma to participate in studies right from their iPhone.

The Asthma Health app furthers asthma patient education and self-monitoring, promotes positive behavioral changes, and reinforces adherence to treatment plans. The study tracks symptom patterns in an individual and potential triggers, so researchers can learn new ways to personalize asthma treatment.

“Now we can reach all corners of the globe to recruit research volunteers and conduct medical

research with sample sizes that are orders of magnitude greater than previously possible for a fraction of the cost,” says Eric Schadt, PhD, the Jean C. and James W. Crystal Professor of Genomics and Founding Director of the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. “This app is the first of a series of disease-related medical research apps we plan to develop, incorporating electronic consent or ‘e-consent’ to enable us to recruit, consent, and enroll research participants remotely via the app without direct, in-person, contact during any phase of the study.”

FACULTY

RECENT RECRUITS

1. Judith Aberg, MD, FIDSA, FACP, Dr. George Baehr Professor of Medicine, Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases and Director of the ID Clinical and Translational Research Center; previously at the NYU School of Medicine.

2. Jason Bobe, MS, Senior Faculty in the Icahn Institute and the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences; also at PersonalGenomes. org; previously at Harvard Medical School.

3. Steven Coca, DO, Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology; previously at Yale University and Yale-New Haven Hospital.

4. John Crary, MD, PhD, Associate Professor (pending) in the Department of Pathology, Fishberg Department of Neuroscience, Friedman Brain Institute, Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s Disease; previously at Columbia University Medical Center.

5. Ernest Depuey, MD, FACC, FASNC, Director of Nuclear Medicine and Clinical Professor of Radiology, Mount Sinai St. Luke’sRoosevelt Hospitals; previously at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

6. Robert Devita, PhD, Professor in the Department of Pharmacology and System Therapeutics as well as the Department of Structural and Chemical Biology; Director of Medicinal Chemistry in the Experimental Therapeutics Institute, previously at Agios Pharmaceuticals.

7. Marla Dubinsky, MD, Chief of Pediatric Gastroenterology in the Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics at the Kravis Children’s Hospital at Mount Sinai, and co-Director of the Susan and Leonard Feinstein Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinical Center; previously at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

8. Stephen Friend, MD, PhD, Professor in the Icahn Institute and the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences; also at Sage Bionetworks.

9. Chris Gennings, PhD, Vice Chair of Research Design and Methodology and Professor of Preventive Medicine and Health Evidence and Policy, Mindich Child Health and Development Institute.

10. Alison Goate, DPhil, Director of the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer's Disease and Professor of Neuroscience; previously at Washington University in St. Louis School of Medicine.

11. Paul Greene, MD, Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology; previously at the Columbia University Medical Center.

12. Percio Gulko, MD, Chief of Rheumatology and The Lillian and Henry M. Stratton Professor of Medicine; previously at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research at North Shore-LIJ Health Systems

13. Dirk Homan, MD, Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine; previously at the University of Colorado, Denver.

14. Adilia Hormigo, MD, PhD, Director of the Neuro-Oncology Program, Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology and the Departments of Medicine and Neurosurgery; member of the Tisch Cancer Institute; previously at the University of Rochester Medical Center.

15. Harish Jasti, MD, Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of General Internal Medicine; previously at University of Pittsburgh.

16. Jian Jin, PhD, Professor of Oncological Sciences, of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics, and of Structural and Chemical Biology; previously at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

17. Robert Klein, PhD, Associate Professor and Director of Cancer Risk Prediction in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences; previously at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

18. Benhur Lee, MD, Professor in the Department of Microbiology and Ward-Coleman Chair in Microbiology; previously at David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

19. William Loging, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and Director of Alliances Management; previously at Boehringer-Ingelheim Pharmaceuticals Inc.

20. Madhu Mazumdar, PhD, Professor of Biostatistics in the Department of Population Health Science and Policy as well as in the Department of Medicine; Director of the Institute for Health Care Delivery Science; and Director of the Biostatistics Core at The Tisch Cancer Institute; previously at Weill Cornell Medical College.

21. Eirini Papapetrou, MD, PhD, Associate Professor in the Departments of Oncological Sciences and of Medicine (Hematology and Medical Oncology Division); previously at the University of Washington.

22. Andreas Plaitakis, MD, PhD, Professor in the Department of Neurology; previously at the University of Crete.

23. John Puskas, MD, FACS, FACC, Professor in the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery at Mount Sinai Beth Israel; previously at Emory University Midtown Hospital.

24. Charles Shapiro, MD, Professor of Medicine and co-Director of Dubin Breast Center, Director of Breast Cancer Research and Director of Cancer Survivorship, Tisch Cancer Institute; previously at Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center.

Research Roundup

New Approach to Whole Genome Assembly

A multi-institute collaboration of researchers has developed a new approach to build nearly complete genomes by combining highthroughput DNA sequencing with genome mapping. The methodology enabled researchers to detect complex forms of genomic variation, critically important for their association with human disease but previously difficult to detect. “We created a high-throughput strategy that builds highly contiguous de novo genomes without the need for complex jumping libraries or targeted approaches. This strategy, in some cases, automatically resolved complete arms of chromosomes,” said Ali Bashir, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine and senior author of the study, published in Nature Methods

Discovery May Lead to Targeted Melanoma Therapies

New Technique Could Counter Antibiotic Resistance

“ Minimal exposure to [modern] practices greatly decreases diversity and removes potentially beneficial bacteria from our micro biome. ”

Melanoma patients with high levels of a protein that controls the expression of pro-growth genes are less likely to survive, according to a study led by Emily Bernstein, PhD, Associate Professor of Oncological Sciences and Dermatology, and published online in the journal Molecular Cell. The research team found that the protein, called H2A.Z.2, promotes the abnormal growth seen in melanoma cells as they develop into difficult-to-treat tumors. H2A.Z.2 is part of the chromosome structure that packages genes, and has the ability to switch them on and off. Having high levels of this protein aberrantly activates growthpromoting genes in melanoma cells. An emerging theory in cancer research is that abnormal growth may result not only from unfortunate mutations in patients’ genes but also from epigenetic mechanisms that turn genes on and off. In the current study, authors found that blocking the functions of H2A.Z.2, either alone or in combination with cancer therapies, effectively blocked tumor growth and killed melanoma cells. “I believe that the study of epigenetic mechanisms may lead to the development of new approaches for molecular diagnosis and targeted treatments,” said Dr. Bernstein.

Researchers have developed a new technique to more precisely analyze bacterial populations, to reveal epigenetic mechanisms that can drive virulence. The new methods hold the promise of a potent new tool to offset the growing challenge of antibiotic resistance by bacterial pathogens. “We created a technique for the detection and phasing of DNA methylation at the single molecule level. We found that a typical clonal bacterial population that would otherwise be considered homogeneous using conventional techniques has epigenetically distinct subpopulations with different gene expression patterns,” said Gang Fang, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomics and senior author of the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. “Given that phenotypic heterogeneity within a bacterial population can increase its advantage of survival under stress conditions such as antibiotic treatment, this new technique is quite promising for future treatment of bacterial pathogens, as it enables de novo detection and characterization of epigenetic heterogeneity in a bacterial population.”

Unprecedented Microbial Diversity Found in Isolated Amazonian Tribe

A multicenter collaboration among US and Venezuelan researchers has discovered the most diverse collection of bacteria yet in humans among an isolated tribe of Yanomami Amerindians in the remote Amazonian jungles of Venezuela. Bacterial diversity in the Yanomami, previously unexposed to antibiotics or industrialized diets, was found to be nearly double that of people living in industrialized countries, and was also significantly higher than in other remote populations moderately exposed to modern practices. The results, published in the journal Science Advances, suggest that antibiotic usage or western diet are linked to the reduced bacterial diversity observed in modern societies. “Even minimal exposure to these practices greatly decreases diversity and removes potentially beneficial bacteria from our microbiome,” said Jose C. Clemente, PhD, Assistant Professor of Genetics and Genomics at the Icahn School and first author of the study.

Stem Cell Disease Model Clarifies Bone

Cancer Trigger

Using induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), researchers led by Dung-Fang Lee, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Developmental and Regenerative Biology, has gained new insight into genetic changes that may turn a well-known anti-cancer signaling gene into a driver of risk for bone cancers, where the survival rate has not improved in 40 years despite treatment advances. The study results, published in the journal Cell, revolve around iPSCs, which enable researchers to coax mature bodily cells to become like embryonic stem cells. “Our study is among the first to use induced pluripotent stem cells as the foundation of a model for cancer,” said Dr. Lee. “This model, when combined with a rare genetic disease [Li-Fraumeni Syndrome], revealed for the first time how a protein known to prevent tumor growth in most cases, p53, may instead drive bone cancer when genetic changes cause too much of it to be made in the wrong place.”

New Hope for Eczema Treatment

A collaborative team led by Emma Guttman-Yassky, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Dermatology, has proven for the first time that atopic dermatitis, or eczema, is an autoimmune disease. Previous studies had left open the possibility that genetic or environmental factors were the greater risk factors for eczema. But the new study, published online in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, showed that certain characteristics of the condition can be reversed by drugs that target two key immune-signaling proteins. “Dr. Guttman-Yassky is really changing the world,” said Mark Lebwohl, MD, Sol and Clara Kest Professor of Dermatology, Chair of the Kimberly and Eric J. Waldman Department of Dermatology and presidentelect of the American Academy of Dermatology.

“She is opening the door to new therapeutic discoveries is helping to improve the quality of lives of patients with eczema.”

Collaborative Research Sheds Light on Neurological Diseases

“

” This discovery has broad implications for biomedical research and opens up new avenues that we look forward to pursuing.

A key protein implicated in Lou Gehrig’s disease and other neurodegenerative diseases has been found to play an important role in the body’s response to viral infection. Neurological diseases have long been associated with inflammation, but the link has not been understood. A new study, published in Nature Immunology, suggests that genetic changes take away the ability of a protein called senataxin to moderate the inflammatory response to certain viral infections, possibly leading to persistent inflammation that could aggravate disease progression. “This discovery has broad implications for biomedical research and opens up new avenues that we look forward to pursuing,” said Ivan Marazzi, co-author of the paper and Assistant Professor in Microbiology. Co-author Harm van Bakel, Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences and in the Icahn Institute of Genomics and Multiscale Biology, noted that the research “required an interdisciplinary approach that would not have been possible without international and cross-department collaboration and the advanced technology resources available at Mount Sinai.”

Hospice Good for Surviving Spouses

Spouses of patients receiving hospice for three or more days more frequently reported reduced depression symptoms, compared to surviving spouses of patients who did not receive hospice, according to a study led by Katherine Ornstein, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine. Published online in JAMA Internal Medicine, this was the first national study to examine depressive symptoms as an outcome for spouses of hospice users with all types of serious illnesses, not just cancer. “We know hospice provides high quality care to patients, but now we’re also seeing a benefit for spouses,” said Dr. Ornstein. “We need to remember that care near the end of life affects not only patients but also their loved ones.”

Recognition &Awards

Faculty from across Mount Sinai have received significant honors in recent months.

The Friedman Brain Institute

Yasmin Hurd, PhD, Professor; Chair, Board of Scientific Counselors, National Institute on Drug Abuse; Plenary Lecturer, World Congress of Psychiatry Genetics; Keynote Speaker, Alcohol and Drug Abuse Center, Loyola State University; Keynote Speaker, University of Chicago Brain Awareness Day; Vice Chair, Gordon Research Conference

William B. Inabnet III, MD, Professor; Vice Chair, Program and Publication Committee, Surgical History Group, American College of Surgeons; Vice President, 2014–2015, and Chair of Fellowship Accreditation Committee, American Association of Endocrine Surgeons; Chair, Committee on VideoBased Education, American College of Surgeons

Eric Nestler, MD, PhD, Director and Professor; 2014 Scientific Achievement Award, Molecular Basis of Brain Disorders Miami Winter Symposium

Daniela Schiller, PhD, Assistant Professor; Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences, Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund and Simons Foundation; Kavli Scientist-Writer Fellow, Kavli Foundation; Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, National Academy of Sciences

The Tisch Cancer Institute

Scott Friedman, MD, Professor, Rao Distinguished Lecturer, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; Salute To Excellence Award, American Liver Foundation; Shanghai Magnolia Gold Award, City of Shanghai; 16th Angel Herrera Award in Health and Experimental Sciences Research, Fundación Universitaria San Pablo CEU, Spain

Yujin Hoshida, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor; Internal Medicine Grand Rounds, Loyola University; Chair, Bioinformatics Working Group for Special Interest Group, Molecular Classification and Biomarkers in Hepatocellular Carcinoma, International Liver Cancer Association; Chair and Lecture, International Liver Cancer Association Meeting

Josep M. Llovet, MD, Professor; Chair and Lecture, European Association for the Study of the Liver Hepatocellular Carcinoma Summit; Chair and Lecture, European Society for Medical Oncology 16th World Congress on Gastrointestinal Cancer;

Chair and Lecture, International Liver Cancer Symposium; Chair and Keynote Speaker, American Society of Clinical Oncology Gastrointestincal Cancers Symposium; Keynote Speaker, European Association for the Study of the Liver-International Liver Cancer Association Joint Symposium; Director and Educational Councilor, International Liver Cancer Association and School of Liver Cancer; Master of Translational Medicine, University of Barcelona; Senior Editor, Clinical Cancer Research, American Association for Cancer Research; Visiting Professor and Lecturer, Mayo Clinic, Scottsdale AZ

Eirini Papapetrou, MD, PhD, Associate Professor; Young Physician-Scientist Award, American Society for Clinical Investigation

Ramon Parsons, MD, PhD, Professor; Chair, AACR special Conferences Committee, American Association for Cancer Research; Chair, “PI3KmTOR/PTEN” Educational Session, American Association for Cancer Research; Keynote Speaker, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories

Mihaela Skobe, PhD, Associate Professor; Chair, Scientific Review Committee, Lymphatic Research Foundation; Chair, Gordon Research Conference

Nathaniel Wisch, MD, Clinical Professor; Keynote Speaker, Department of Biology Graduation, University of Rochester

Department of Cardiac Surgery

David H. Adams, MD, Professor; Councilor, American Association for Thoracic Surgery

Julie Swain, MD, Senior Faculty; Career Achievement Award 2013, US Food and Drug Administration Center for Devices and Radiological Health

Department of Dermatology

Andrew Alexis, MD, MPH, Associate Professor; 2014 Leaders of Distinction Award, Journal of Drugs in Dermatology; Chair, Diversity Task Force, American Academy of Dermatology; Chair, Scientific Committee, Skin of Color Society

Karen E. Burke, MD, PhD, Assistant Clinical Professor; Elected Member, American Dermatology Association

Vincent DeLeo, MD, Professor; Chair, Judicial Panel, American Academy of Dermatology; Member, American Academy of Dermatology; Chair, Fisher Award Committee, American Contact Dermatitis Society

Mark G. Lebwohl, MD, Chair and Professor; Extraordinary Service Award, National Psoriasis Foundation; President-Elect, American Academy of Dermatology; Everett Fox Lectureship, American Academy of Dermatology; Thomas Fitzpatrick Lecture, Massachusetts General Hospital

Noah Scheinfeld, MD, JD, Assistant Clinical Professor; Vice President, Hidradenitis Suppurativa Foundation

Nanette Silverberg, MD, Professor; Keynote Speaker, Skin of Color Society; Hair and Nail Subsection, Pediatric Dermatology Research Alliance; Board Member, Pediatric Dermatology Subsection, American Academy of Pediatrics

Joshua Zeichner, MD, Assistant Professor; Treasurer, American Acne and Rosacea Society

Department of Developmental and Regenerative Biology

James J. Bieker, PhD, Professor; Plenary Speaker, International Symposium on Erythrocyte Biology

Ross L. Cagan, PhD, Professor; Farahe Maloof Lecture, Massachusetts General Hospital

Philippe Soriano, PhD, Professor; Co-Organizer, Mouse Molecular Genetics Meeting, Sanger Institute; Keynote Speaker, German-Israeli Helmholtz Research School; Session Chair, Craniofacial Morphogenesis and Tissue Regeneration, Gordon Conference

Department of Emergency Medicine

Saadia Akhtar, MD, Assistant Professor; Keynote Speaker, Academic Assembly, Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors; President-Elect, Board of Directors, Council of Emergency Medicine Residency Directors

Mark Clark, MD, Assistant Professor; 2014 Residency Director of the Year, Emergency Medicine Residents’ Association

Ula Hwang, MD, MPH, Associate Professor; Ollie Randall Award, Gerontological Society of America Annual Meeting; President, Academy of Geriatric Emergency Medicine, Society for Academic Emergency Medicine; GEDI WISE CMS Health Care Innovation Award Program to Improve Geriatric ED Care, Gerontological Society of America Annual Meeting; Keynote Speaker, Acute Care for Elders Annual Conference; Keynote Speaker, Trauma and Emergency Care Series, University of Maryland

MOVING FORWARD, TOGETHER

AS A COMPREHENSIVE HEALTH SYSTEM, particularly one that responds to the needs of the community, we are always thinking about the future. The operation of hospitals, the business of medicine, and the care delivery system are changing so rapidly that those who are not focused on what the landscape will look like in five years will not be prepared to navigate change nor make decisions necessary to thrive. Autonomous smaller facilities might be able to focus more on the immediate future, asking, How does my little hospital survive in this sea of turmoil around me? But in a larger system, like ours, we must have a forward-looking management team working together to create the future.

And a plan for the future must be grounded in what makes us great. The Mount Sinai Health System is singularly shaped by the presence and dynamism of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, a close partner to the seven member hospitals of the System. As the sole medical school collaborating with these hospitals, Icahn School of Medicine offers outstanding education

programs, conducts groundbreaking research and provides the highest quality care to our patients. To grow together as a system, everyone—doctors and leadership—must communicate effectively. Each of us has to trust our peer presidents. Things have changed since the times of Lincoln. In the world we live in, teams of rivals may not have the spirit of collaboration necessary to cooperate, coordinate, and create integrated care models across multiple hospitals. It has been our privilege to find the right people to lead the future of health care—a team of friends who bask in each other’s successes, who embrace trust and transparency, and who share a vision for the Health System, even as they act on that vision in very different local contexts. In the pages that follow, the leaders of our School and seven hospital campuses discuss their institution’s strengths, local communities, and plans for the future.

Kenneth L. Davis, MD President and CEO, Mount Sinai Health System

Kenneth L. Davis, MD President and CEO, Mount Sinai Health System

Dennis S. Charney, MD

Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System

THE ICAHN SCHOOL OF MEDICINE AT MOUNT SINAI

As a top-20 medical school partnering with seven distinctive member hospitals, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai is a robust foundation of expertise and leadership for the entire Health System. The vast knowledge and experience of our faculty span the biomedical spectrum and are central to shaping our preeminent educational, clinical, and research programs.

Our culture of innovation inspires faculty, students, and staff to band together to solve the most pressing challenges in the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of human diseases. The Health System’s enormous, diverse patient population, a microcosm of the larger world, presents remarkable opportunities for our work to make a difference.

We encourage students to pursue their passions and prepare to become the next generation of leaders through MD, PhD, and Masters programs—and postgraduate programs for newly minted physicians and researchers—that emphasize translational research and discovery. Strategic planning ensures that the curriculum reflects the rapidly changing

biomedical environment, and has resulted in new educational programs promoting innovation, entrepreneurship, and technology development. Recent affiliations with Google, IBM, and Apple further enhance the unique opportunities that we offer students and trainees.

Pioneering translational research by our faculty is at the heart of our scientific programs. Scientists and physicians throughout the Health System work together to improve human health; entrepreneurship and innovation are key to bringing discoveries to the public. Clinical and translational research activities are blossoming throughout the Health System: Collaborations with experts skilled in engineering and physics further expand our reach. As the School approaches completion of a decade-long strategic plan, one that has dramatically increased both the size of the research faculty and the extramural funding to support their work, we will be creating a new strategic plan, a roadmap for continued growth and success over the next ten years.

Side by side with our scientists, more than 6,000 physicians throughout the Health System provide outstanding clinical care along the spectrum from primary to quaternary care. Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice is growing rapidly as member hospital clinicians join the School faculty. We innovate to ensure that excellent outcomes, high patient satisfaction, and population management drive our quality.

THE MOUNT SINAI HOSPITAL

As a leading teaching hospital serving one of the most diverse patient populations in the world, The Mount Sinai Hospital has a mission to provide excellent primary and specialty care for all. As we move forward, we will build our clinical programs by focusing on tertiary and quaternary care for the Health System’s most complex patients.

The seamless integration of The Mount Sinai Hospital with the Icahn School of Medicine on a unified campus has existed since the origin of the School. The Hospital founded the School in 1963; all physicians practicing at The Mount Sinai Hospital are faculty of the School, and the vast majority of medical education for Icahn students occurs within our inpatient and ambulatory practices. The physicians practicing here are among the most prominent academic physicians in the nation. They and their partner scientists offer our patients access to the most advanced treatments and procedures in every specialty. To give only a single example, revolutionary approaches to advanced cancer management can now target the genetic profiles of cancer for specific patients. Individualized medicine is one of hundreds of ways that The Mount Sinai Hospital’s integration with the Icahn School of Medicine enables us to focus on quaternary care at the same time that we become leaders in population health management.

The Hospital is gradually expanding critical care and intermediate care capacities, including operating room renovations, a new four-bed intermediate care unit for inpatient neuroscience, and expanded telemetry capabilities for more than 40 additional beds throughout the hospital. We will also construct a new 20-bed critical care and intermediate care unit to further increase adult intensive care capacity. The expansion of our intensive-care capacity means we can amplify our neurosurgery and Heart Hospital programs, growing fields and ones in which we are recognized as a national leader. We offer advanced treatments to our neighbors and to patients from around the world for the full spectrum of brain and spinal diseases, including tumors, aneurysms, stroke, epilepsy, movement disorders, and the full complement of advanced heart care, including coronary

artery and valve disease, heart failure, and rhythm disturbances.

We will also reconstruct pediatric (PICU) and neonatal intensive-care units (NICU) in our Kravis Children’s Hospital to accommodate continued growth of our nationally ranked pediatric services. The first phase of NICU expansion increases capacity by 22 percent. The newly renovated PICU provides a family-friendly environment for the care of medically complex pediatric patients as well as complex pediatric cardiac patients. Expanded telemetry capabilities allow us to care for additional children requiring continuous monitoring.

We are also building strongly in oncology through The Tisch Cancer Institute. The Institute includes the Dubin Breast Center and the Ruttenberg Treatment Center, our two state-of-the-art facilities that offer specialized, multidisciplinary approaches to cancer screening, treatment and survivorship. As visits to Dubin and Ruttenberg continue to increase annually, along with growth in non-cancer (therapeutic) infusion, expanded clinical areas of the Hess Center for Science and Medicine will facilitate the needs. We are committed to providing the most advanced cancer and non-cancer infusion treatments to everincreasing numbers of patients.

Caryn Schwab, MA Executive Director, Mount Sinai Queens

MOUNT SINAI QUEENS

Our hospital has been a watchful student and active trendsetter, diligent in determining where health care is today and where it is headed. Our host borough— rich in diversity, culture, food, and talent—is experiencing tremendous growth through immigration and residents who are relocating from Manhattan and many areas of the nation.

While we fo cus primarily on the health of the borough, we measure our success against the best hospitals in the country for quality, patient experience, and patient safety. A few years ago, we underwent a complete transition to an electronic health record system when—literally, overnight— the Hospital fully integrated its information technology with The Mount Sinai Hospital. Other recent accomplishments include redesignation as a Joint Commission-Certified Primary Stroke Center; and Magnet Recognition Program® designation for excellence in nursing together with The Mount Sinai Hospital, a status that is awarded to fewer than 8 percent of hospitals in the nation. We opened a new Infusion Center in 2015 that is a key component of The Tisch Cancer Institute of the Icahn School of Medicine, which is now

offering clinical trials to our cancer patients.

We are well positioned to meet the evolving health care needs of our patients and are in the middle of a $150 million construction project that will expand our campus from 80,000 to 220,000 square feet. Opening in 2016, the new building will be the locus for our integrated delivery system— one that focuses on disease prevention and wellness, as well as caring for those who are ill. The heart of the project in the new six-story facility is a “one-stop” outpatient experience, with a large multispecialty practice and advanced imaging. New state-of-the-art operating rooms are able to support more complex surgeries and the expansion of ambulatory surgery. The building is anchored by a new, larger Emergency Department, designed to handle the Hospital’s expansion beyond the current volume of 50,000 visits annually.

Central to Mount Sinai Queens’ ability to be agile and responsive in the ever-changing health care environment is its relationship with the Icahn School of Medicine. The School’s academic conferences and continuing medical education offerings provide both physicians and administrators with access to the latest research in evidencebased medicine. The Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice of the Icahn School of Medicine is key to Mount Sinai Queens’ physician recruitment efforts, bringing academic energy to communitybased medicine and supporting our strategic introduction of population health management to our patients.

MOUNT SINAI BETH ISRAEL

Mount Sinai Beth Israel has a crucial role in New York City’s health care landscape, serving a diverse patient population from the lower Manhattan and Brooklyn communities. Historically, Beth Israel cared for immigrant patients who had no alternatives elsewhere in the City. As health care demands change—economically, clinically, and socially—we, too, are changing. We are creating the hospital of the future, which will drive forward population health and deliver a better patient experience to all we serve.

We recognize that a top-down approach will not create a sustainable care model, so we are engaging every person in the organization to think and behave as an owner. The transformational change in care is happening on the front lines as we practice meaningful interactions among our team members, our providers, and most importantly our patients every day. Our main goal and key challenge here is to enhance the patient experience, which I believe is the single most important driver of success across all our hospitals.

Integral to our future is our growing relationship with the Icahn School of Medicine. The research expertise of the School is connecting our physicians to clinical and basic science research, and our patients to clinical trials and advanced treatment modalities.

The potential impact on patient care is tremendous. For example, scientific investigation of the genetic bases of medical conditions prevalent in the many ethnic and cultural groups served by Mount Sinai Beth Israel holds great promise for advancing how we learn to diagnose, treat, and prevent diseases in those populations. In addition, as an international brand in medical education, Icahn School of Medicine offers us creative new approaches to educating future doctors, and is spurring us to think differently about the delivery of patient care.

Our hospital’s current physical plant challenges our ability to deliver efficient, quality care, so we have a remarkable opportunity before us: to demonstrate what the hospital of the future looks like in an urban setting. This technically advanced, clinically safe, patient-centered hospital will be smaller and more agile, and will have a greater ambulatory footprint. We are actively evaluating existing services and modeling new ones to respond to the needs of our community. We are also working closely with the Icahn School of Medicine to build new clinical partnerships, and integrate seamless transitions of care across the in- and outpatient environment.

Other major initiatives include expanding our clinical programs in neuroscience, cancer service, cardiology, urology, pulmonary, GI, and general surgery; re-envisioning our Philips Ambulatory Care Center; investing in leadership and management systems in the areas of training, protocols, and succession planning; and evaluating how behavioral health services are delivered today and into the future.

Susan Somerville, RN President, Mount Sinai Beth Israel

Lin H. Mo, MBA, MPH President, Mount Sinai Brooklyn

MOUNT SINAI BROOKLYN

Early in 2014, Mount Sinai Brooklyn began its five-year turnaround to advance medical and surgical services in Midwood, Brooklyn, a rapidly changing community that includes Orthodox Jews, African- and Caribbean-Americans, and Russian immigrants. I am delighted to report that we are already seeing dramatic achievements. In a challenging market and regulatory environment, we have achieved financial efficiencies and a bottom-line gain through improved patient care, caring for higher acuity patients while standardizing operations, and reducing overtime use.

Our 212-be d hospital holds patient safety as a core value and has been improving quality and safety through on-site and System initiatives and sharing of best practices. Our innovative STOP Sepsis program has improved patient care and reduced mortality, and has been highlighted by the Greater New York Hospital Association for its success. We have achieved historically low rates of hospital-acquired infections and reduced readmission rates and falls with injury.

Meanwhile, we are advancing and expanding clinical services in: orthapaedics, including spine care; urology, nephrology, gastroenterology, colorectal, vascular and general surgery; and ear, nose and throat; we are also building on our high quality critical care program. We plan to add more Russian-speaking staff, to better serve our bilingual community.

We are embarking on an ambitious renovation of the hospital’s first and second floors, as well as building a 4000-square-foot primary care and urgent care center nearby to expand access in the community. For inpatient services, we have renovated Unit 2-West, with 20 new beds.

All these changes mean that we are working to prepare our doctors, voluntary attending physicians, to transition from a fee-for-service care environment to the future model of population health. We are excited by our new partnership with the Icahn School of Medicine, which holds promise for joint participation in a full range of graduate medical education training programs on our campus.

Our strength as a small hospital lies in our people—physicians with longstanding ties to the community, nurses, managers, administrators, patient care assistants and others who provide highly personal care. It is an honor and privilege to lead this extraordinary group. Our turnaround has already yielded greater staff dedication, morale, and teamwork, en route to making our hospital the “Best in Brooklyn.”

MOUNT SINAI ROOSEVELT

Located in a vital area of Manhattan burgeoning with residential growth, Mount Sinai Roosevelt is a fullservice community and tertiary care hospital. We have a long tradition of superb obstetrical care, a large and well-appointed emergency department, and renowned excellence in many areas of elective surgery.

Our 500-be d hospital is a gateway to the Mount Sinai Health System for the West Side, through robust outpatient services, obstetrical care, primary adult, family medicine, and pediatric care, as well as all facets of emergency care. We have Manhattan’s first in-hospital birthing center and a high quality obstetric service. While we no longer have inpatient pediatric services, we will grow and expand our outpatient pediatric offerings. With the support of the System resources of Mount Sinai Heart, we are developing a vibrant outpatient and cognitive cardiology program. Integration into the Icahn School of Medicine is critically important to the current and future success of Mount Sinai Roosevelt—from collaboration on clinical program development and expansion of services, to medical and graduate education, as well as basic science, translational and clinical research. The School is already enhancing our ability to attract and recruit talented clinicians and researchers to our campus, which will increase the breadth of programs and services we can offer on the West Side. By joining Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice and the School of Medicine, our hospital is better positioned to meet the complex challenges of health care reform, population management, and technological and research innovation.

We are putting a strong focus on elective surgical programs, especially orthopaedic surgery, urology, vascular surgery, neurosurgery, thoracic surgery, colorectal surgery and surgical oncology, and breast care. Special programs of excellence include: the Kidney Stone Center of Mount Sinai; airway reconstruction in our robotic thoracic surgery program; robotic bladder surgery; comprehensive breast care and reconstruction; complex and branched aortic graft surgery; colorectal surgery; and neurosurgery. We are in the planning stages of expanding outpatient orthopaedics, including building out 10,000 square feet of space to accommodate new recruits and services. And we are growing our joint replacement services.

With proceeds from a building sale, we will increase our surgical infrastructure, including expanded central sterile processing; more and larger “operating rooms of the future”; and streamlined, patient-centered pre- and postoperative care. To advance surgical excellence and innovation, we will create a Surgical Innovation Laboratory that will support surgeons, residents, fellows, students, and industry partners in pioneering new, minimally invasive surgical techniques and devices with enhanced opportunities for translation to the bedside.

Evan L. Flatow, MD President, Mount Sinai Roosevelt

Arthur A. Gianelli, MBA, MPH President, Mount Sinai St. Luke’s

MOUNT SINAI ST. LUKE’S

Mount Sinai St. Luke’s connects residents of the Upper West Side

with an outstanding Health System. We are a hospital with a proud tradition of medical firsts—particularly in cardiology and cardiac surgery—and a generations-long commitment to this vital and ever-changing New York neighborhood. Our hospital’s family-like environment and welcoming culture extend to the staff, many of whom have worked here for years. They are the primary reason we are known in the System as the Little Engine that Could. Being part of the Mount Sinai Health System allows us to centralize functions, reducing costs and giving us the ability to leverage expertise and best practices. Our growing relationship with the Icahn School of Medicine, an internationally renowned medical school in the highest tier, adds an extraordinary dimension to our future direction. Our physicians now serve on

the Icahn School faculty, and we are better positioned to recruit the very best new clinicians to our programs. The profusion of knowledge, ideas, talent, and resources offered by the School are certain to enhance the experiences of both our patients and our caregivers.

Our strategic plan calls for developing several centers of excellence here, beginning with recapturing our pioneering leadership in cardiology and cardiac surgery. As an extension of Mount Sinai Heart, with internationally known experts joining our team, we are creating a center of excellence in this area and have already doubled our volume in electrophysiological and cardiac surgical service.

Across the Health System and throughout our hospital, we are consolidating inpatient and outpatient services to build a one-stop center of excellence at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s in behavioral health, including addiction services and primary care. For our growing diabetic population, we are creating an interdisciplinary diabetes center of excellence with specialists in endocrinology, bariatrics, podiatry, wound care, vascular care, and ophthalmology—a center built on collaboration among specialists, primary care physicians, and research scientists.

We will support thes e clinical centers of excellence with related surgical specialties, as well as advancing general surgery and trauma services. In addition, we will create an unrivaled ambulatory network that connects urgent care centers and primary care facilities with multispecialty practices and hubs of ambulatory care across the Upper West Side. Real estate sales and refinancing will enable us to invest in our ambulatory care network, renovate our emergency department, construct an urgent care center, build a faculty practice, add an electrophysiology lab to improve the flow of our operating room, build out lobbies for the hospital and our ambulatory center, and improve way-finding.

NEW YORK EYE AND EAR INFIRMARY OF MOUNT SINAI

We combine a proud tradition as the oldest specialty hospital in the nation with forward-looking leadership in the diagnosis and treatment of all disease of the eyes, ears, nose, and throat, and in plastic surgery. Our goal is to make New York Eye and Ear one of the best specialty hospitals in the world, offering the most innovative therapies and clinical studies to our patients.

We have all the elements in place to achieve this vision, combining our clinical excellence and volume with the Icahn School’s academic excellence in ophthalmology and ear, nose, and throat services (ENT). Over the next five years, we are going to expand our clinical research footprint and clinical centers of excellence. We plan to increase our full-time faculty, including at our satellite practices. We have also entered into joint ventures with community physicians in areas such as the Bronx and Bayside, Queens. And we are focusing on sustaining a high degree of reliability, efficiency, safety, quality, and patient satisfaction.

When you combine our hospital’s clinical volume (some 30,000 surgical cases and 225,000 outpatient visits per year) with the academic

excellence of the Icahn School of Medicine, we are ideally positioned to lead the way in translational research. Already, we have begun working with the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology. In addition, the Health System joins us to a wider medical education community. We now have medical students rotating with us, so we are training the next generation of doctors and scientists who will shape ophthalmology and ENT medicine.

To accommodate our strategy for clinical and research growth, we know we will have to build a new space for a hospital entering its third century (we were founded in 1820). We have begun exploring possibilities and are excited about our future.

Mount Sinai Health System

ILLUSTRATION BY CHRIS DENT

The Mount Sinai Health System combines the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and seven hospital campuses to provide the highest quality health care throughout the New York metropolitan area. The System includes:

OUR FACILITIES

1 top-20 medical school

7 member hospitals

12 ambulatory surgical centers

10 free-standing ambulatory surgical centers

Approximately 45 ambulatory care practices for nonsurgical services

OUR PEOPLE

Approximately 6,200 physicians, including general practitioners and specialists

2,000+ residents and fellows

36,000 employees

32 departments

31 institutes

OUR SERVICES

3,535 inpatient beds

135 operating rooms

Annually:

169,532 inpatient admissions

• 2.6+ million non-emergency outpatient visits

489,508 Emergency Department visits

• 18,000 babies delivered

OUR SYSTEM

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

1468 Madison Avenue, Manhattan

Founded 1963

The Mount Sinai Hospital

1468 Madison Avenue, Manhattan

1,171 beds

Founded 1852

Mount Sinai Queens

25-10 30th Avenue, Long Island City

235 beds

Founded 1896, joined Mount Sinai in 1999

Mount Sinai Beth Israel

First Avenue at 16th Street, Manhattan

856 beds

Founded 1889

Mount Sinai Brooklyn

3201 Kings Highway, Brooklyn

212 beds

Founded 1954, joined Beth Israel in 1995

Mount Sinai Roosevelt

1000 Tenth Avenue, Manhattan

505 beds

Founded 1871

Mount Sinai St. Luke’s

1111 Amsterdam Avenue, Manhattan 523 beds

Founded 1846

New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai

310 East 14th Street, Manhattan

69 beds

Founded 1820

Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice

5 East 98th Street

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

The Mount Sinai Hospital

Mount Sinai Doctors Faculty Practice

A DAY IN THE LIFE

OF THE MOUNT SINAI HEALTH SYSTEM

Around the clock, throughout the five boroughs—and across the lifespan—the Mount Sinai Health System delivers care, conducts research, and trains a new generation of biomedical experts. Here is a glimpse into just a handful of the hundreds of departments and programs that comprise Mount Sinai—and into lives forever changed by what we do.

BY ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN

Above: 5:30am | The Birthing Center at Mount Sinai Roosevelt

8:00am | Pediatric Surgery Unit, New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai

7:30am |

8:28am | The

9:15am | Department of Neurology, Mount

10:00am | Pediatric Surgery Unit, New York Eye and Ear

10:24am | Comprehensive Pediatric Epilepsy Center, Mount Sinai Beth Israel

10:45am | Hess Center, Icahn School of Medicine

11:09pm | Department of Emergency Medicine, Mount Sinai Brooklyn 12:00pm | Mount Sinai Queens Infusion Center

12:09pm | Mount Sinai Queens Infusion Center

12:30pm | Comprehensive Pediatric Epilepsy Center, Mount Sinai Beth Israel

1:05pm | The Birthing Center at Mount Sinai Roosevelt

2:03pm | Corinne Goldsmith Dickinson Center for Multiple Sclerosis, The Mount Sinai Hospital

2:41pm | Retina Service, New York Eye and Ear

4:25pm | Lauder Family Cardiovascular Ambulatory Center of Mount Sinai Heart, The Mount Sinai Hospital

3:33pm | Wiener Family Palliative Care Unit at the Lilian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute

3:45pm | Division of Endocrinology, Diabetes and Nutrition, Mount Sinai St. Luke’s

4:52pm | Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute, The Mount Sinai Hospital

4:30pm | Lauder Family Cardiovascular Ambulatory Center of Mount Sinai Heart, The Mount Sinai Hospital

7:40pm | Department of Emergency Medicine, Mount Sinai Brooklyn

1:30am | The Birthing Center at Mount Sinai Roosevelt

6:03pm | The

7:10pm | Kidney Stone Center, Mount Sinai Roosevelt

3:34am | Department of Emergency Medicine, Mount Sinai Brooklyn

22 MILES

BY SIMA RABINOWITZ

That Will Change the Destination of Biomedicine

Mapping

the Future of Medical Education

By subway, by bus—from Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai on the Upper East Side—students have a short trip to assignments at Mount Sinai Beth Israel in lower Manhattan or Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai Roosevelt on the West Side. Mount Sinai postdoctoral fellows, residents, and medical education students are commuting among Health System hospitals and learning what it takes to go the distance, supported by travel stipends and shuttle bus service to support System-wide opportunities for students and trainees.

“Uptown. Downtown. East Side. West Side. The crossroads of the whole world,” says Mark Clark, MD, Residency Program Director for Emergency Medicine for the System. “Our traveling students and trainees are supported by networks of integrated teams of exemplary medical educators across nearly every discipline.” In fact, the merger last year instantly doubled the size of Mount Sinai’s faculty.

“Creating compassionate, competent physicians remains our priority,” says Michael Leitman, MD, Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Medical Education (GME) and Chief of General Surgery at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. At 230 distinct clinical/research programs with more than 2,400 residents and fellows, the Health System has “created the largest

GME program in the country,” he says. “Yet the individual experience is what truly matters—every student, resident, or fellow, and every patient he or she treats today or tomorrow, drives everything we do, from research in the lab to bedside interactions. We have the facilities to train the best clinicians, physician-educators, and physician-scientists.”

Dr. Leitman’s vision is shared by David Muller, MD, Dean for Medical Education at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who read extensively about the history of Mount Sinai’s new partners when the merger with Continuum was announced. “I was surprised to learn that every hospital’s mission in the System is in alignment with ours, caring for the diverse underserved populations of New York City, and that our new partners are exemplary teaching hospitals with rich track records of excellence in education. All of these hospitals have been critical to the health of New York City for more than a century.”

The trip across Manhattan opens the doors to a remarkable range of educational and training opportunities in clinical practice as well as basic science, clinical, and translational research—and both GME and Medical Education (Med Ed) offerings throughout the System extend well beyond the island of Manhattan, including a new residency program at

DID YOU KNOW?

Medical School graduates are not certified to practice medicine. They must complete GME programs to earn certification. An MD degree is the first stop on the path to a career in medicine. Graduate medical education is the obligatory next stop along the way to clinical practice.

The US offers the most advanced system of formal medical education in the world. The federal government subsidizes GME programs to ensure a stable, professionally trained medical workforce.

The Mount Sinai GME Consortium established in 1996 comprises 17 hospitals and affiliated programs in all five NYC boroughs and New Jersey.

Many GME programs across System hospitals will merge into single integrated programs.

the Institute for Family Health in Kingston, 90 miles north of the City. “Across our System, there is almost no duplication. We’re bringing together unique strengths and specialties, establishing an enormous footprint across New York, and creating educational opportunities that are among the premier programs in the world in nearly every specialty of medicine,” affirms J Mocco, MD, Vice Chair for Education, Department of Neurosurgery, and Director of Cerebrovascular Surgery Program, Mount Sinai Health System. His department, like many in the System, is in the process of integrating hospitalbased residencies and fellowships into unified programs, including a required neurosurgery rotation (clerkship) for Med Ed students.

Dr. Mocco, recruited to Mount Sinai this year from Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, says innovative opportunities to advance medical education were a primary motivation for his return to New York (he earned his MD degree and a Master’s in Biostatistics from Columbia University). “We’re developing incredible electives for medical education students with a focus on novel clinical trials. There is no major new clinical trial or treatment in cerebrovascular surgery [operative treatment of diseases of the blood vessels of the head, neck, and spine] in which the Mount Sinai Health System is not involved. Medical students, residents, and fellows across the country looking to become leaders in this field will want to train with us.”

On a typical day, our students and faculty are on the move across New York City in a journey that will change their lives, their professions, and the future of medicine:

Residents in pulmonary medicine from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai are busy all day in the Simulation Training Center at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, a newly renovated, state-of-the art facility. “Sim training” is critical for learning about medical management of low frequency high-risk events (acute but infrequent life-threatening emergencies) that require specialized expertise yet offer only limited options for hands-on experience. A team led by Pierre Kory, MPA, MD, Program Director, Pulmonary Disease and Critical Care Medicine Fellowship at Mount Sinai Beth Israel and Simulation Training Director, prepares students, residents, and fellows in the subspecialty of critical care ultrasonography and other subspecialties not previously offered at the School. “Icahn School of Medicine faculty are international leaders in lung cancer, video larynography [X-ray depiction of the larynx], and medical education in respiratory health. Now, we will have our hospitals’ combined strengths to develop leadership in an area of increasing medical need and complexity,” Dr. Kory says.

Mark Lebwohl,

MD, Professor and System Chair, Dermatology

Fellows in dermatology at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s will spend the morning working with faculty mentors in the dermatology pathology lab on the Icahn campus. St. Luke’s has specialized in pediatric dermatology, among other areas. Students can also train with international leaders in cosmetic dermatology (repair of cosmetic defects, often caused by disease or illness), and fellows across the System have opportunities to train in subspecialties, including the treatment of eczema and psoriasis. “Mount Sinai has worked on nearly all the major treatments that have been developed in dermatology over the last ten years, and we have new biologic treatments unavailable elsewhere that are going to change management of these diseases in dramatic ways,” says Mark Lebwohl, MD, Professor and System Chair, Dermatology. “GME students from all of our hospitals will gain experience with these novel treatments and can become the next generation of leaders in dermatology.”

Med Ed students are en route today from the Icahn campus to Mount Sinai Beth Israel where they’re completing a required third-year rotation in OB-GYN. They may choose among any of the hospitals for their clerkship, but many opt for Beth Israel, which has established a unique Family Planning Center. “Women’s reproductive health is a basic human right,” notes Laura MacIsaac, MD, MPH, Director of Family Planning, Associate Chair for Education and Research, and Residency Program

Director at Mount Sinai Beth Israel. Yet most medical schools offer little or no training in family planning.

“We’re implementing a one-month intensive fourth-year elective,” she says, “We’ll be the first program in the System with a completely integrated program of Med Ed and GME. The more good ideas, the better. We can influence education, training, and national policy around women’s reproductive health issues.”

More than 70 students, residents, fellows, faculty, and Mount Sinai Health System staff will gather from early morning until late afternoon on the Icahn campus for the first full day of a two-day Trans Health Care Workshop (health issues related to the lives of patients who identify as transgender), offered through the Department of LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender) Health at Mount Sinai Beth Israel, the premier such site in New York City and one of the largest and best known LGBT health programs in the nation. Scott Jelinek, an MD, MPH candidate at the School of Medicine, collaborated with Barbara E. Warren, PsyD, LMHC, who is Director for LGBT Health Services for the Mount Sinai Health System, to create the course. Leading speakers from throughout the City will share their insights and discuss the future of Trans Health. “We’re learning to function in diverse hospital settings, which will make us competitive for residencies nearly anywhere and will make us the best health care provider for all of our patients,” says Scott, who received his MPH in

May 2015 and expects to receive his MD in 2017. He plans a career in primary care and recently completed a monthlong Med Ed rotation at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s.

More than 100 Emergency Medicine (EM) residents from across the hospitals’ third- and fourth-year residencies are “out of town” today on a special retreat devoted to “Professionalism and Humanism,” organized by Dr. Clark, based at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai Roosevelt. This is not the first collaboration among System participants. The Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, and Mount Sinai Roosevelt each host one conference annually that brings together all EM residents and faculty. “Residents are learning from physicians who work in different environments and engage with very different populations,” says Dr. Clark. With half a million emergency room visits annually across the System, EM is clearly a field of great significance. “We’ve all been there, a moment of crisis. It’s almost impossible to be prepared enough. We’re exposing students to different styles of practice and teaching, so that they will be equipped to deal with every conceivable situation.”

A third-year Med Ed student will meet this afternoon with a patient she has come to know through the INTERACT Program and a clerkship in Psychiatry at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai Roosevelt hospitals. INTERACT is a unique, year-long clinical experience engaging students in patient assessment and care over a sustained period. The two hospitals, which are regional and national leaders in the subspecialty of addiction medicine and other areas of mental health, have proved

an ideal setting for this sustained program of education and engagement. In fact, The Addiction Institute of New York at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s/ Mount Sinai Roosevelt is the only one of its kind in the country.

“The core of medicine remains the connection between physician and patient. This is the heart and soul of medicine,” says Prameet Singh, MD, Associate Dean for Graduate Medical Education, Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry. Dr. Singh believes the System has strengthened partner institutions on numerous levels: “We’re attracting the best students and can provide the most comprehensive education across multiple specialties; our offerings are robust and will continue to grow; and we offer the most unique educational opportunities available anywhere in the U.S., enabling us to attract exemplary faculty passionately committed to medical education.” Dr. Singh adds that the School must impart the values embodied by the Health System: commitment to community; the reality of patients’ lives; focus on primary care and family medicine; and understanding of health care economics and policy.

The sky is as dark as the subway tunnels. After a long day treating patients and mentoring students, faculty in respiratory medicine from all the hospitals in the System are meeting on the Icahn campus for their “Working Group.” Within days of the Continuum/Mount Sinai merger, Charles A Powell, MD, Professor of Medicine, Pulmonary, Critical Care and Sleep Medicine and CEO of the new Mount Sinai-National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute,

convened a team of faculty to explore the potential for creating economies of scale while optimizing fellowship opportunities in pulmonary medicine. (Hassan Khouli, MD, Associate Professor at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s/Mount Sinai Roosevelt and Director of Advanced Medical Simulation, brought all postdoctoral fellows across the System together in a similar effort to share experiences about curriculum, training, teaching approaches, and bedside patient care.) Future meetings will probably happen via videoconferencing. The integrated new world of medical education and patient care makes cyber travel as necessary as a Metro Card.

“ We’ve created a network of faculty and students committed to exemplary medical care as a basic human right. They’re excited to have a home that embodies a shared mission, values, and vision.” — Dr. David Muller

The possibilities open to students are unequalled, but “right size” informs our vision and programs. “We’re not growing the size of our class; we’re growing opportunities,” says Dr. Muller. He is realistic about the challenges integration has created, a faculty twice the size it was a year ago and the need to create uniform processes and standards, as well as development of Icahn’s Institute of Medical Education, which provides teaching tools, support, resources, and incentives to support faculty. “We’ve created a network of faculty and students committed to exemplary medical care as a basic human right. They’re excited to have a home that embodies a shared mission, values, and vision.”

That Mount Sinai Health System home is, in essence, an entire world of medicine and science, from the New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai on 14th street, the oldest specialty hospital in New York, to global health programs for students, residents, and fellows involved in programs from Mongolia to Mozambique. In fact, Dr. Leitman reports, residents and fellows are increasingly interested in global health. The Mount Health System offers an unusual approach, requiring a formal education component prior to international on-the-ground experiences.

“Our students and trainees will be equipped to compete for the most competitive clinical and research positions across the New York City region and the country in hospitals, in research institutions, and with technology firms designing novel treatments,” says Dr. Leitman. “We can

recruit the best students and faculty and offer them opportunities to train here and to stay in the region. We’ve created a learning environment with a laboratory of change, a model that creates new paradigms of education to improve patient care through integrated clinical experiences and research. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with a great team.”

Michael

Leitman,

MD, Senior Associate Dean for Graduate Medical Education

The Mount Sinai Health System is dedicated to a new itinerary for GME and Med Ed on a national scale (and nearly every GME program has fellows and residents from around the world, as well). Mount Sinai has been invited to provide guidance about GME and Med Ed to the federal government on matters of policy, research, training, and technology, as national standards and funding mechanisms are developed.

“As a physician, treating my patients with compassion, respect, and personal attention is rewarding,” says Dr. Singh. “As an educator, I can multiply that impact. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of patients will benefit from our students’ commitment to personalized patient care.”

For students, a few subway stops or a bus ride can result in innumerable outcomes related to improved health, remarkable science, and treatments that can change outcomes for patients. Neighborhood by neighborhood, a short trip. The journey—literally—of a lifetime.

One Standard of Care

Driving Quality and Safety throughout the System

BY DEBORAH SCHUPACK

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ANDREW LICHTENSTEIN

When Jeremy Boal, MD, was a resident in internal medicine at Mount Sinai twenty years ago, he met a patient who would change the course of his career. An elderly woman who had recently lost her husband, she had been swindled out of her money, suffered from dementia, heart disease and poor vision, and was homebound in her East Harlem walk-up.

“There was no possible way for her to navigate the health care system,” recalls Dr. Boal, who had been headed for a fellowship in oncology. “Once I realized there were people out there—literally, in the shadow of the hospital—who were in desperate need of care but couldn’t simply come to the doctor when they were sick, it became clear to me that there was a very important body of work that needed doing. I fell in love with understanding how the system works and making sure the patients were getting all their needs met.”

This patient and others like her inspired Dr. Boal to co-found Mount Sinai’s Visiting Doctor Program in 1995 and to spend his career working to gain a better understanding of health systems and to improve patient care and access. Today, as Executive Vice

President and Chief Medical Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System, he is responsible for ensuring and advancing quality of care and patient safety for the largest health care system in New York City.

Now the industry has, in many ways, caught up with Dr. Boal’s vision. In this new landscape, the metrics of quality and safety have become critical measures of health care delivery, driving strategy, reimbursement, and, ultimately, success. Medicare, for example, closely aligns payments to an organization’s quality and safety outcomes. “There is no trick to doing well in this environment,” Dr. Boal says. “The only ‘trick’ is to produce better outcomes, higher quality, safer care, and greater access, all at a lower price.”

The Mount Sinai Health System, which serves perhaps the most diverse patient

population in the U.S., is ideally positioned to lead the way in achieving better care for more people at lower costs—an accomplishment called the Triple Aim. Featuring centers of excellence across the seven member hospitals, the System will be able to consolidate administrative functions and avoid costly duplication of resource-intensive services while expanding reach to more communities. “The hard work is to take all these wonderful assets, physicians, nurses, different cultures— cultures of the hospitals and the communities they serve—and align them into a unified whole that provides exceptional results and creates one standard of care wherever a patient interacts with the system,” says Dr. Boal. “The words Mount Sinai mean something very special to our patients, doctors, and employees.”

Sharing Best Practices

“We decided very early on that being big wasn’t the point, being great was,” Dr. Boal says of the merger. “Our five-year goal is to be number one in the region and in the nation’s top decile in all the metrics that matter.” These include preventable mortality and hospital readmissions, safety measures, value, access to care, and patient satisfaction—which, he points out, has improved in every hospital in the System over the past year.

For Brian Radbill, MD, CMO of Mount Sinai Queens Hospital, those System-wide targets and best practices provide a vital blueprint for action at his hospital. “As a CMO, it gives me clear focus to develop our System priorities and put them into action at the hospital level,” he says. “When you take best practice and combine it with your local context, that’s when you get real performance improvement. For me, that’s been the most satisfying part of being a System.”

“We can identify areas and hospitals and programs where we’re doing exceptional things, learn from each other, and spread im-

provements across the System,” Dr. Boal notes. “We’re finding pockets of excellence all over the System. By creating transparency across all facilities and leaders, we can improve much faster than if we were stand-alone facilities.”

Dr. Boal regularly distributes a comprehensive dashboard so that hospital leaders can measure their safety and quality records against those of other Mount Sinai hospitals,

where we’re not doing as well, we learn from the System. There’s a lot of give and take, and good natured competition, which allows us all to make our patients safer and healthier.”

“It’s the beauty of an extended family,” says Tracy Breen, MD, FACP, Mount Sinai Roosevelt’s CMO. “We’re working with people who are close, but they’re not so close. Sometimes you need people with a little distance to come in

“We decided very early on that being big wasn’t the point, being great was.”

make improvements where necessary, and offer insights where warranted. For example, when peers noticed Mount Sinai Roosevelt’s very low rates of the colon infection C. difficile, the telephone started ringing. “We got calls asking, ‘How did you do that?’” says Evan Flatow, MD, President of Mount Sinai Roosevelt. “We look at our techniques and share them across the system. We like the fact that the System learns from our successes, and, in areas

and look with fresh eyes to say, ‘I see opportunities here.’ I would rather that person be part of my extended family, particularly with all the expertise we have in the System.”

In addition to sharing best practices, member hospitals also share talent and resources, something Art Gianelli, President of Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, particularly appreciates. “What we get from Mount Sinai, the people and resources and sharing of best practices, really

elevates our game,” says Mr. Gianelli.

Dr. Boal emphasizes the value of listening to the day-to-day experiences of patients and frontline staff. Everyone is a source of ideas, and everyone is an engine for improvement. “We’re extraordinarily data driven and track metrics very closely,” he says. “But to get the true flavor, we turn to the voices of the patients, the families, the nurses, the physicians, all the staff.”

At Roosevelt, for instance, conversations between hospital leaders and an operating room nurse revealed that lead shields for X-rays were stored in three different areas, reducing efficiency. “I could have sat in my office for a hundred years and not known that the lead shields were an issue,” says Dr. Flatow, adding that the hospital has since streamlined shield storage. “We learn by talking to everyone in the organization.”

Another goo d idea—a “zero birthday party” to celebrate a premature infant’s reaching the original due date—came from Kenneth Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Health System, during a recent visit to Roosevelt’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

Advancing the Conversation

Every other Friday, more than 30 leaders across the System gather in a 14th-floor conference room at Mount Sinai Roosevelt to discuss ways to advance quality and safety. “Even before the ink was dry on the merger, we were bringing the leadership together every

two weeks at the Quality Leadership Council meeting to focus our efforts on integration and getting to excellent,” says Dr. Boal. “We share everything openly in these meetings. Hospitals struggling in certain areas get help from hospitals that are doing well in those areas.”

On a frigid Friday morning in February, the meeting began with a conversation about how talent development is crucial to moving an organization forward. “Are we doing enough in this area?” Dr. Boal asked the group.

The robust discussion that followed covered the strengths and challenges of staff training and development in various hospitals and System-wide, what should change, what will be difficult to change, and how to work together to achieve success. “We are in the process of shifting attitudes, shifting cultures, to move thirty-five thousand employees towards change,” said Marc Napp, MD, the System’s Chief Medical Affairs Officer. “Wherever you are in the organization, you need to be thinking about training those under you, even if it’s only one person.”

“We are a learning institution,” added Sandy Myerson, MBA, MS, BSN, RN, Chief Patient Experience Officer.

The conversation covered individual and team accountability, the degree of creativity employees need for problem-solving, what it means to be highly reliable organization, and how to use organizational tools such as Lean Six Sigma to improve efficiency and processes. “The goal is for everyone in the organization to have enough knowledge and wisdom to exam ine the performance of their team and work

“The goal is for everyone in the organization to have enough knowledge and wisdom to examine the performance of their team and work to improve it.”

to improve it,” Dr. Boal said, synthesizing the conversation. “And when a problem arises, there is a shared understanding of how to look at a problem and solve it. Creativity comes in to solve problems, but within a framework.”

Above: More than 30 leaders meet every other Friday to discuss ways to advance quality and safety.

The conversation concluded with a homework assignment of sorts. “Sometime during the coming week,” prompted Dr. Boal, “ask yourself, ‘Am I a better leader than I was last year?’ If so, what experiences helped you get there? If not, what stood in the way?”

Dr. Boal’s management style throughout the meeting was quiet but persistent, iterative, engaging, and respectful. He leads through strategic and provoking questions, building consensus. “I can’t accomplish anything alone,” he said later. “In the old model, if you were an excellent physician, that’s all it took. But with the complexity of today’s health system and how we care for patients, it genuinely takes an

Building a System from the Ground Up

Growing up as the son of a Long Island cardiologist, Jeremy Boal always knew he wanted to be a doctor. He tried on a number of specialties, dreaming as a boy of becoming an infectious diseases doctor, studying microbiology and immunology at McGill University in Montreal, shifting to hematology in internship at the University of Minnesota, and pursuing a residency at Mount Sinai in internal medicine. It was then, when he was treating patients in the East Harlem community, that he found his true passion.

“I was struck as a resident by how many patients just didn’t do well when they went home, despite our best efforts in taking care of them as inpatients,” Dr. Boal recounts. “It wasn’t that medical care was lacking. It was other social determinants—poverty status, language barriers, limited family support. I became interested in going out into the community to really understand how such life situations affect complex chronic illness.”

At Mount Sinai, where he remained for ten years, Dr. Boal and two other residents founded the Visiting Doctors Program, which provides quality compassionate care to frail, elderly, or ailing adults unable to leave their homes. Today, the program is the largest of its kind in the nation and serves more than 1,100 patients annually. Dr. Boal was its Executive Director in its early years, and later was responsible for the care in all of the Department of Medicine’s faculty practices.

Then he left for North Shore-LIJ Health System, where he eventually became Chief Medical Officer with overall responsibility for quality and safety in the health system’s 16 hospitals, as well as ambulatory, home care, and other practices. During his tenure as CMO, the health system saw markedly improved performance in critical areas including hospital acquired harm, mortality due to sepsis, ambulatory access to care, and improved relationships between medical staff leaders and their constituents. “I really got the quality and safety bug,” he says. “It was terrific opportunity to look at how you drive change across a multi-system complex.”

That drive continues in his new role at Mount Sinai, where he has been Chief Medical Officer since 2013. “The opportunity here is unique, building a system from ground up with people who are genuinely committed to excellence and innovation, to health care transformation and managing populations,” he says. “It’s especially exciting because when we improve as a system, we touch that many more lives.”

The Patient Experience

A Conversation with Sandy Myerson

Little things can make all the difference. A patient might be receiving life-saving cancer treatment, but if a nurse comes into the hospital room and raises the gown to look at an incision without a word of greeting—as happened recently to a friend of Sandy Myerson’s at a non-Mount Sinai hospital—the patient’s experience can be destroyed in an instant. “Sometimes health care providers are so focused on getting done what they have to do that they forget there’s a human being in that bed, not a diagnosis,” says Ms. Myerson, MBA, MS, BSN, RN, Senior Vice President and the first Chief Patient Experience Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System and of the Joseph F. Cullman Jr. Institute for Patient Care.

As the “patient experience” has become a vital measure of health care quality, we spoke to Ms. Myerson about how she defines the term and how she is collaborating with hospital and system leadership and staff to foster a patient-centered culture that provides compassionate, coordinated, and exceptional care across the all inpatient and outpatient settings.

How do you define the patient experience?

The patient experience is everything that patients and family members experience through their journey with the Health System. It starts with the phone call to schedule the first appointment and doesn’t really end unless the patient discontinues the relationship with our hospital.

What does the patient experience mean to Mount Sinai, and what is the impact on patient care?

The patient experience defines the Mount Sinai Health System. We need to pay attention to all aspects of the experience: how we provide care and transitions of care, how we communicate with patients and family members. We should be communicating with empathy and compassion and be listening actively and effectively. When we do, we reduce patients’ anxiety and increase their confidence, and they tell us things they might not otherwise tell us. This enables us to provide better, more informed care.

Why has the patient experience become such an important measure of successful care?

Back in the day, patients used to do what the doctor told them to. With the increase in chronic conditions today, health care providers must listen and ask questions to understand each patient’s goals and formulate a plan that will help the patient be successful. It’s much more participative. The other piece driving change has to do with reimbursement. Health care systems and providers are no longer begin paid by whatever care we deliver. We’re being reimbursed based on quality of care, safety, and how patients view their interactions with us. The financial implications are driving change faster than if it were evolving on its own.

What are you doing throughout the System to improve the patient experience?

I’m working with teams across all hospitals to develop communication skills that further relationship-centered or relationship-based care. This is all the more challenging in the five boroughs because we must learn how to communicate effectively irrespective of someone’s background, culture, or language. A simple step is to find out something about the patient that’s unrelated to why they are in the hospital. When we know something personal that’s important to them, we start to connect with them as human beings.

MOUNT SINAI’S CLINICAL INSTITUTES AND CENTERS

BY KATIE QUACKENBUSH SPIEGEL AND DEBORAH SCHUPACK

When the Mount Sinai Health System was formed, it became one of the largest nonprofit health systems in the region. This was also a major step forward in the history of New York City health care, and means that the System now manages more than 2.5 million patient visits each year.

So how best to move from a reputation as being nimble and “right-sized”—managing change lithely, balancing parallel research and care agendas, and providing patientcentered care for a diverse population—to treating so many patients, without losing the essential nature of Mount Sinai? To ensure that this ethos remains deeply embedded

CANCER CLINICAL PROGRAMS

“We are unifying cancer services throughout the System and throughout the City with the goal of offering patients with a cancer diagnosis superior access and value.”

– Dr. Luis Isola

“New York City has some of the best cancer programs in the world,” notes Dr. Luis Isola, MD, Director of the Mount Sinai Health System’s Cancer Clinical Programs, and Professor of Medicine. Yet many New Yorkers prefer to access treatment at their local hospitals. Recently recognized for excellence as a National Cancer Institute (NCI)designated center, Mount Sinai has built a comprehensive, unified network of cancer services that offers the best of both worlds: best-in-class oncology care for all, with many access points throughout the City—often in a patient’s own neighborhood.

“We are unifying cancer services throughout the System and throughout the City with the goal of offering patients with a cancer diagnosis superior access and value,” says Dr. Isola. “This means providing the same high level of quality at reasonable cost across all our member hospitals and ambulatory centers from neighborhood to neighborhood, borough to borough.”

Actually, the programs combine the best of three worlds, connected as they are to a major academic medical center. As the population ages and as cancer becomes more of a chronic illness than an acute one, Mount Sinai is ideally positioned to care for not only the cancer diagnosis but the whole person. “This is a disease of aging,” says Steven Burakoff, MD, Director of Mount Sinai’s Tisch Cancer Institute and the Lillian and Henry M. Stratton Professor of Medicine, Professor of Oncological

in every patient experience, the System has built diseasefocused clinical and research medical “homes,” called Institutes or Centers.

The newest ones to be established focus on cancer, HIV, pulmonary disease, diabetes, and primary care, with plans underway for more that will serve patients with digestive diseases, renal disease, liver disease, and autoimmune disorders. Mount Sinai Science & Medicine spoke with leaders from three of these innovative medical hubs, which are driving a powerful shift in the way patient care is managed at medical centers everywhere—and of all sizes.

Sciences. “For patients who have co-morbidities, you better have great cardiovascular support, or support in infectious disease, or for those who have renal problems. I really do believe you are best off at a great medical center.”

Mount Sinai’s Canc er Clinical Programs—the multifaceted entity has not yet been formally named, though Dr. Isola notes “there will definitely be a plural somewhere in the name”—are different from other wellknown programs in that Mount Sinai’s is not a hub-andspoke structure. Rather, the plan involves a strategic distribution of high quality services throughout the City, based on existing resources and community needs, preserving or expanding access where appropriate, and avoiding certain high-cost duplication. “It’s one cancer system with multiple geographies,” says Dr. Isola. “We have excellent hospitals throughout the City, and we make sure they have the tools they need to care for patients with the level of quality and standards that Mount Sinai stands for.”

Uniform quality across the system

As with other clinical services across the System, increased access is being met with increased oversight to ensure uniform quality. The field of oncology, Dr. Isola points out, is burgeoning with information. “If you talk to different oncologists about a patient with a given disease

in a given stage, you can have many slightly different opinions about treatment,” he says.

Mount Sinai has establishe d disease management teams to set and maintain a single standard of care no matter where a patient is treated. “We are establishing a process where we are continuously minimizing variation across the System. At the same time, we are improving quality and outcomes,” says Dr. Isola. “Our goal is that when a patient comes in with a certain diagnosis, we have a unified plan across locations. For instance, we would say to a person who comes in with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, ‘This is the way we treat the disease across our System. These are our outcomes, this is what you can expect, this is what it’s going to cost you.’ That transparency is where health care is going.”

Exponential impact on research

When Mount Sinai merged with Continuum Health Partners, the number of patients coming into the System with a cancer diagnosis doubled overnight. “For us, the most important result of the large merger of cancer programs is our ability to offer clinical trials to a much larger audience,” says Dr. Isola. “The advances in cancer don’t come on only one side of the enterprise. Our greatest impact comes in the translation. We make discoveries at The Tisch Cancer Institute, translate those discoveries into clinical trials, learn from those trials, and take that learning back to the lab.”

As most of the lab oratory-based research is located at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai is building an integrated clinical trial program in which qualified patients can enroll at the most appropriate location throughout the System. This will create astonishing volume that will greatly advance translational research—particularly in the area of genomics, explains Dr. Burakoff. “We’re building tumor banks that will be drawn from all the patients in the System, and ultimately those tumor banks will be linked to clinical outcomes and genomics. So all of a sudden, we have one of the largest cancer programs in the country.”

Single port of entry

The master plan for the programs has taken another big step forward recently with the introduction of a new toll-free number and the construction of a comprehensive website to provide, says Dr. Isola, a “single port of entry for all patients who contact us.” Patients will then be triaged to the best place for their care based on a number of factors, including their type of cancer, where they live, and whether they already have a relationship with a doctor. For certain types of cancers we will concentrate expertise in a single location, while for more common tumors we will offer multiple sites. Says Dr. Isola, “We’ll have no trouble matching patients to the excellent care they need—as close to home as possible.”

TISCH CANCER CENTERS OF THE MOUNT SINAI HEALTH SYSTEM

▲ Specialized Programs

Basic and Comprehensive services

BMT

• Phase 1 program

Translational research

■ Comprehensive Cancer Center

Basic cancer services

• Radiation

Access to clinical trials

Centers of excellence

● Basic Cancer Services

Cancer surgery

Breast surgery

Chemotherapy infusion

• Screening

PRIMARY CARE INSTITUTE

BY

“While our first focus is on providing the highest quality care for our patients, we are also very focused on expansion, patient and provider satisfaction, and retention.”

– Dr. Roy Cohen

Primary care itself is at a crossroads: There is a shortage of primary care providers in the U.S., yet accessible primary care is central to improving population health and reducing the high cost of health care. Successful primary care practice can reduce the number of ER visits and hospitalizations, prevent disease onset, improve quality of life for patients with chronic disease, and identify patterns in a patient community to improve its future health. Barbara Murphy, MD, Chair of Medicine and Dean for Clinical Integration and Population Health, says this is what Mount Sinai’s Primary Care Institute was designed to do.

“With the Primary Care Institute, we’re moving primary care forward with a multidisciplinary, patientcentered approach to coordinate patient care across the continuum of health care environments,” says Dr. Murphy. Charged with leading the development of the Institute, she says primary care throughout the Mount Sinai Health System is no longer provided by a lone practitioner working independently in an affiliated practice or office. “It’s a much more ongoing, dynamic, proactive process.”

“Our primary care practices employ a team-based approach that incorporates patient care liaisons, nurse care managers, social workers, and pharmacists to engage patients in care and educate them about their illnesses,” says Roy Cohen, MD, Director of the Primary Care Institute. “This is called a ‘medical home’ model of care, and it allows us to reach out into the community to remind patients about cancer screenings and vaccinations, and to work with them on control of their chronic diseases, like diabetes, asthma, or congestive heart failure.” He adds that this proactive, coordinated approach to identifying patients in the community and engaging them in their care early and more intensely improves outcomes, and also allows patients to avoid seeking care in emergency rooms and being hospitalized.

The model also creates a ripe research opportunity— and works ideally in a health system like Mount Sinai,

where translational medicine is the order of the day. The Primary Care Institute cares for an enormous population.

“By centralizing and coordinating patient care across the entire system, it’s easier for us to interject clinical research coordinators to ensure we enroll eligible patients into studies and trials that further our understanding of how to diagnose, manage and treat chronic diseases” says Dr. Murphy. “Research is more streamlined, and we have the ability to do a multi-center study within one health care system.”

This moves p opulation health forward, Dr. Murphy explains, because researchers are able to leverage a vast amount of patient data, utilizing Mount Sinai’s existing bioinformatics and computational expertise, to identify trends smaller primary care practices wouldn’t see. “We can identify subpopulations of patients at risk for worse outcomes and tailor care plans and supports to their needs,” Dr. Murphy says. “We use data to drive how we provide care, to monitor our outcomes and ensure that we are achieving the best results for our patients.”

Making our primary care practices an excellent place to work is also crucial, adds Dr. Cohen. “While our first focus is on providing the highest quality care for our patients, we are also very focused on expansion, patient and provider satisfaction, and retention.” He notes that the goal for the Institute’s leadership is to cultivate an environment where every employee is engaged in the team-based medical home model of care and where they feel their voices are heard. And attracting more physicians to primary goal can help address the chronic shortage.

“We also want to train the next generation of primary care providers in the Institute’s model,” Dr. Cohen says. “Mount Sinai is a huge player in the New York region and around the country, and if we retain and also export more primary care physicians who are trained in this innovative way of providing care, it will become the standard—and that’s a big lift we’re proud of.”

INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED MEDICINE

About 10 percent of Americans with HIV live in New York City—and more than 12,000 of these patients, the largest patient population in the city, are cared for at the six clinics that make up Mount Sinai’s new Institute for Advanced Medicine.

“Our goals are to get the community viral load and the rate of new infections as low as possible,” says Dr. Michael Mullen, Medical Director of the Institute for Advanced Medicine. “But the major reason we created the Institute is to improve patient care: to give people with HIV and people affected by HIV—partners, children—the best possible care.”

“Our goals are to get the community viral load and the rate of new infections as low as possible.”

– Dr. Michael Mullen

Sharing the philosophy of the Primary Care Institute, the Institute for Advanced Medicine offers HIV patients a “medical home”: a dedicated pharmacy; dental services; screening and treatment for common co-infections like hepatitis B and C and sexually transmitted diseases; and specialized care for the many co-morbidities that can accompany an HIV diagnosis, such as hyperlipidemia and coronary artery disease. The Institute also focuses on geriatric care, an increasingly important field since more than half of HIV patients are over the age of 40, and treatment for chemical dependency problems. The Institute’s brand of care is integrated, team-based, and patient-focused, and follows HIV clinical protocols to identify at-risk populations and stop new infections.

While many me dical centers provide care for HIV patients, those institutions are often in the process of moving away from investing in the future of the disease. Dr. Mullen explains that this loss of interest isn’t happening at Mount Sinai. “Our leadership has identified HIV as a priority,” he says. “Mount Sinai’s culture is to provide the best, state-of-the-art care, obviously, but we also want to do it in a way that is an example for other medical centers locally, nationally, and internationally since our care model could be adapted at other places.”

“In the U.S. and other developed countries, we have fortunately been able to treat HIV for more than twenty years and HIV has become more of a chronic disease,”

BY ROBERT

says Dr. Judith Aberg, Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, who recently joined Mount Sinai to lead the HIV research effort. She explains that because the Institute’s patient population is large and highly diverse— patients may be young or old, male or female, of different races or ethnicities and socioeconomic backgrounds—the Institute is well-positioned to make scientific strides through a comprehensive basic, clinical, and translational research program.

“Through the Institute for Advanced Medicine, we are developing protocols to tackle the dual agenda of preventing new HIV infections and offering novel treatments for patients already infected,” Dr. Aberg says.

Dr. Aberg and her team are participating in a new National Institutes of Health-sponsored study to determine whether a statin will reduce the risk of heart disease and other co-morbidities associated with HIV infection.

“As our HIV infected patients age, they experience health issues caused by inflammation, like colon cancer and heart disease, more often and earlier in life than the general population—a process referred to as ‘inflammaging.’ We want to know whether giving HIV patients this FDA-approved statin, called pitavastatin, can improve their health. We can help drive this research because we have the integrated, centralized model of patient care provided through the Institute.”

Dr. Mullen and his clinical team are also leveraging data culled through the Institute to identify patients at high risk for infection (partners of HIV patients or intravenous drug users, for example). The Institute uses a powerful intervention called pre-exposure prophylaxis, or “PrEP”: a pill that, if taken daily, can prevent HIV infection. “When PrEP is taken properly, it is almost 100 percent effective. We care for many discordant couples, where one partner is HIV positive and one is not. It’s an amazing feeling to know we prevented an infection.

“Educating our patients, giving them the tools they need to remain healthy—this is making a difference. It’s why I love my job.”

Transformational Gifts Support Top Priorities

Several gifts received since the closing of The Campaign for Mount Sinai—which exceeded its $1 billion goal and brought in $1.5 billion for the institution’s strategic priorities—have provided new and significant support for the Health System’s key initiatives. Areas benefiting from these gifts, all received since the official close of the Campaign in December 2013, include:

“Donors like these, who bring their commitment and caring to causes that resonate so deeply with them, are critical to our philanthropic efforts.”

- Mark Kostegan, FAHP, Mount Sinai’s Chief Development Officer and Senior Vice President for Development

Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s Disease

Trustee Daniel S. Loeb and his wife, Margaret Munzer Loeb, have made a $15 million gift to establish the Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer’s disease in memory of Daniel’s father. “I am honored to establish this new center and to support groundbreaking research in Alzheimer’s disease,” Mr. Loeb said.

“When my father was sick, I learned how painful this disease is for those afflicted and their families.

I also recognized that there is little hope for patients today beyond slowing the progression of Alzheimer’s.

We urgently need more resources to find a cure or effective prevention.”

The Loeb Center is a network of research programs closely tied to clinical initiatives across the Mount

Sinai Health System, and is led by Alison Goate, MD, world-renowned for identifying some of the key gene mutations linked to the heritable risk for Alzheimer’s disease. She is collaborating with a team of experts at Mount Sinai that includes Mary Sano, MD, a national leader in clinical trials of Alzheimer’s disease and director of Mount Sinai’s Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center, and Sam Gandy, MD, associate director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center and a foremost expert on the amyloid plaque protein linked to Alzheimer’s disease. Mount Sinai has been at the forefront of Alzheimer’s disease research and care ever since President and CEO Kenneth L. Davis, MD’s own groundbreaking work in Alzheimer’s disease more than 35 years ago opened new avenues in the relief of symptoms from this disease, leading the FDA to approve three of the first four drugs on the market for its treatment.

The Arnhold Global Health Institute

Thanks to a transformational $12.5 million gift from The Arnhold Foundation and the Mulago Foundation Mount Sinai has established The Arnhold Global Health Institute. For years, Mount Sinai has been at the forefront of addressing the problems of global health, and our physicians, nurses, researchers, and students work around the world to prevent disease, provide care, and build health care capacity for some of the globe’s most underserved populations. With the formation of The Arnhold Global Health Institute, Mount Sinai is continuing to build these global partnerships and, in turn, creating a forum for collaboration among Mount Sinai’s students, physicians, scientists and trainees involved in global health.

Prabhjot Singh, PhD, MD has joined Mount Sinai as director of The Arnhold Global Health Institute and vice chair of Population Health in the Department of Medicine. As director, Dr. Singh will align high-potential global and domestic health activities across the Icahn School of Medicine and the Mount Sinai Health System.

The Patty and Jay Baker National Palliative Care Center

Philanthropists Patty and Jay Baker made a landmark $10 million gift to Mount Sinai to expand our national program in palliative care by funding a new center to transform the care of seriously ill patients and unite our national education, research, and advocacy efforts. The Patty and Jay Baker National Palliative Care Center at Mount Sinai unites under one umbrella Mount Sinai’s National Palliative Care Research Center (NPCRC) and the Center to Advance Palliative Care (CAPC), creating greater opportunities for innovation and collaboration. CAPC and NPCRC have together led the growth in access to quality palliative care in the United States; the number of palliative care programs in hospitals across the nation has more than tripled in the last 10 years.

The Center is jointly led by Diane E. Meier, MD,

director of CAPC, and R. Sean Morrison, MD, director of the NPCRC and of Mount Sinai’s Lillian and Benjamin Hertzberg Palliative Care Institute, who state that the center’s mission is to “ensure that all patients and their families living with serious illness understand the role of palliative care in improving quality of life and request it; that all clinicians have the knowledge and skills to provide palliative care; and that all health care institutions are equipped to deliver it.”

Lauder Family Cardiovascular Ambulatory Center

The Lauder Family Cardiovascular Center officially opened its doors this spring, thanks to a transformational gift from Ronald S. Lauder, Leonard A. Lauder, and their families in honor of Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, the director of Mount Sinai Heart. “I have the deepest gratitude for the Lauders,” said Dr. Fuster. “The future of health care is the ambulatory setting as we move from treating disease to a focus on promoting health.”

The 20,700-square-foot Center is located in the Guggenheim Pavilion lobby. Mount Sinai physicians treat nearly 300 heart and vascular outpatients a day in the Center, which features 22 exam rooms, five vascular ultrasound rooms, and a patient library. The walls are adorned with colorful photographs of nature, taken by the late Evelyn H. Lauder and donated by the Lauder family.

The team at the Center is led by Joseph M. Sweeny, MD,

LAUDER BY THE NUMBERS

20,700 square feet

300 heart and vascular outpatients a day

22 exam rooms

5 vascular ultrasound rooms

1 patient library

40 cardiologists

16 fellows

60 nursing, clinical, and support staff

medical director, and Haydee Garcia, NP, nursing director, and includes more than 40 cardiologists and vascular physicians, 18 fellows, and more than 60 nursing, clinical, and support staff, including a nutritionist and social worker. Located in the Guggenheim Pavilion lobby, the Center offers specialized patient care in cardiovascular disease prevention, general cardiology, cardiac imaging, cardiac rehabilitation, heart failure and transplantation care, vascular medicine, and vascular surgery.

Harris Precision Wellness Center

The newly created Harris Center for Precision Wellness, located within the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology, is establishing a solid foundation for the realization of precision wellness, a highly personalized and proactive approach for maintaining optimal health and vitality, and preventing disease. The Center was formed thanks to a $5 million gift from Trustee Joshua Harris and the Harris Family Fund, and will complement Mount Sinai’s diseasefocused institutes by being the first institute focused on wellness and the prevention of disease.

The precision wellness platform of the Harris Center will enable the Icahn Institute to synthesize all of the disease-specific information that it receives from the Health System’s other institutes into groundbreaking approaches to measure and model wellness and to help prevent disease. “We will be able to harness recent advances in digital health, genomics, and data science to reveal how individual differences in genes, environments, and lifestyles contribute to complex human diseases, and how to apply these potent technologies to help preserve and enhance wellness,” said director Joel Dudley, PhD, and co-director Gregory Stock, PhD.

Derfner Foundation Ambulatory Surgery Suites

The new Derfner Foundation Ambulatory Surgery Suites is offering same-day surgery for Mount Sinai patients in a warm and comfortable setting without being admitted into the main hospital. The Ambulatory Surgery Suites, located on the 14th floor of the May Center for Mount Sinai Doctors, is transforming the way Mount Sinai serves patients. Select teams of surgeons, anesthesiologists, and

nurses can perform a variety of surgeries, including colorectal, general surgery, gynecology, laparoscopy, ophthalmology, orthopedics, otolaryngology, pain management, pediatrics, plastic and reconstructive, urology, and vascular.

The Suites were dedicated in January 2015 and made possible thanks to a $5 million gift from Trustee Jay Lieberman and the Derfner Foundation. “The Derfner Foundation’s gift is transforming the way we serve our patients and is a great model for our hospital,” said Michael L. Marin, MD, FACS, chairman of the Department of Surgery. “The long-standing mission of the Department of Surgery is to discover new approaches that benefit our patients, and the opening of our Ambulatory Surgery Suites is the most recent in a long list of accomplishments for the department.”

Huffington Center for Stem Cell Research and Parkinson’s Disease

A $5 million commitment from the Houston-based Huffington Foundation has enabled Mount Sinai to launch the Huffington Center for Stem Cell Research and Parkinson’s Disease. The Center will allow Thomas Zwaka, MD, PhD and his team to pursue several lines of investigation, including the development of a novel ex vivo model of the human central nervous system and the study of engrafted cells in this system. This multifaceted approach will encompass work on several different cell types—direct reprogramming of adult stem cells, iPSCs, and most importantly, patient-specific embryonic stem cells—and the use of these cells to screen both drugs and genomes for factors that influence cell behavior and disease. Because Parkinson’s disease is caused by the relatively selective death of a single type of neuron in the brain—midbrain dopamine neurons—it may be particularly amenable to stem cell therapies where induced neurons replace the dying cells.

“The support of the Huffington Foundation is instrumental in our ability to make dopaminergic neuronal transplant a viable therapy for Parkinson’s disease.”

- Thomas Zwaka, MD, PhD

Celebrations

Over the past year, Mount Sinai hosted more than 40 events in New York City, the Hamptons, Florida, and at the Aspen Ideas Festival, attended by nearly 6,000 guests. Here is a look at some that celebrated our community of dedicated, committed partners.

The 30th Annual Mount Sinai Crystal Party

WHEN: May 7, 2015

WHERE: Central Park Conservancy Garden, New York City

WHO: 1. Ash Tewari, MD; Senator Charles C. Schumer (D-NY); John Levin, Trustee; James Tisch, Trustee. 2. Darin and John Eydenberg. 3. David and Karen Freedberg. 4. David Janke, Zibby Janke, Eva Heyman, Doug Heyman

Ribbon Cutting for the Honest Company Ultra Clean Room in the Senator Frank R. Lautenberg Environmental Health Sciences Laboratory

WHEN: September 10, 2014

WHERE: The Mount Sinai Hospital

WHO:

A Conversation with Donors: Accelerating the Path to New Treatments for Multiple Myeloma

WHEN: June 16, 2015

WHERE: The Carlyle Hotel, New York City

WHO: RoAnn Costin;

Dubin Breast Center Fourth Annual Gala

WHEN: December 3, 2014

WHERE: Mandarin Oriental Hotel, New York City

WHO: 1. Peter Kiernan, Eaddo Kiernan, and Glenn Dubin, Trustee.

2. Michael Brodman, MD; Iris Smith, Michael Smith.

3. Beth Dozoretz, Ronald Dozoretz, MD

Lauder Family Cardiovascular Ambulatory Center Ribbon Cutting

WHEN: May 6, 2015

WHERE: The Mount Sinai Hospital

WHO: 1. Dennis Charney, Valentin Fuster, Leonard Lauder, Ronald Lauder, Kenneth Davis.

2. Valentin Fuster with Mitzi and Warren Eisenberg

Dubin Breast Center Fact vs. Fiction Luncheon and Symposium

WHEN: September 29, 2014

WHERE: 320 Park

WHO: Eva Andersson-Dubin, MD; Joel Pashcow; Bonnie Pfeifer

Tyler’s Room Dedication Ceremony

WHEN: October 21, 2014

WHERE: Mount Sinai Beth Israel

WHO: Gary, Diane, Jonah, and J. Marley Seaman

Celebration and Ribbon Cutting for the Blau Center for Children’s Cancer and Blood Disease

WHEN: January 14, 2015

WHERE: The Mount Sinai Hospital

WHO: Lisa Blau and Jeff Blau, Trustee

Opening of the Senator Frank R. Lautenberg Environmental Health Sciences Laboratory

WHEN: May 19, 2015

WHERE: The Mount Sinai Hospital

WHO: David Reich, MD; Ellen Lautenberg; Douglas Hendel; Philip Landrigan, MD

Mount Sinai Women’s Health Day of Learning and Luncheon

WHEN: November 13, 2014

WHERE: The Plaza Hotel, New York City

WHO: 1. Joan Raines, Jane Rittmaster, Ginny Aaron, Vivian Farah. 2. Kimberly and Aaron Tighe

Council of Advocates Breakfast

WHEN: October 29, 2014

WHERE: Harold Pratt House

WHO: 1. Kenneth Dichter. 2. Alice Netter, Trustee; Ruth Nerken, Phillips Beth Israel School of Nursing Co-Chair, Board of Trustees

A Conversation with Donors: Precision Urology and Emerging Trends in Prostate Cancer

WHEN: April 28, 2015

WHERE: The Waldorf Astoria

WHO: Sandy and Richard Jacoby

Celebration and Ribbon Cutting for the Susan and Leonard Feinstein Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinical Center

WHEN: May 14, 2015

WHERE: Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis Center for Advanced Medicine, The Mount Sinai Hospital WHO: Marla Dubinsky, MD; Bruce Sands, MD; Kenneth L. Davis, MD; Jean-Fred Colombel, MD; Susan Feinstein; Leonard Feinstein; Jim Marion, MD; Daniel Present, MD

Annual Trustee Dinner

WHEN: December 2, 2014

WHERE: The Metropolitan Club, New York City

WHO: 1. Glenn Dubin, Eric Mindich, and Robert Rubin. 2. Gail and Carl Icahn. 3. Susan Cullman, Edgar Cullman, Jr., Elissa Cullman. 4. Richard Friedman, Merryl Tisch, Lisa Satlin, MD, Steven Burakoff, MD. 5. Susan Friedman, Vanessa

A Conversation with Donors: Personalized Cancer Immunotherapy

WHEN: March 5, 2015

WHERE: The Palm Beach Country Club WHO: 1. Stephen and Mary Ann Ehrlich. 2. Jonathan Seckler, MD

Inaugural Luncheon for the Legacy Society of Mount Sinai Health System

WHEN: June 17, 2015

WHERE: A Voce Restaurant, New York City

WHO: 1. Barbara Deane, Ann Marie Schiro, Enid Nemy. 2. Helen Roosevelt; Betty Klipstein

A True Partner in the ‘Quest for Wellness’

To hear the passion and conviction with which he speaks of medicine and the connection between physician and patient, it might seem clear that Jeremy Abramson, MD, ISMMS ’00, was born to be a doctor. Yet Dr. Abramson, Clinical Director of the Lymphoma Program at the Cancer Center of Massachusetts General Hospital and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, very nearly choose another career.

“As an undergraduate theater major, my focus was on designing and directing theater productions,” says Dr. Abramson. “I was so happy in theater that I was torn up whether even to try medical school.” But when he was offered a spot at Mount Sinai as one of the first medical students to be part of the pioneering Humanities and Medicine Early Assurance Program, which enrolls undergraduates from the humanities and social sciences who have not taken traditional pre-med courses, Dr. Abramson decided to accept. “I’m incredibly grateful I did,” he said. “I loved every day of medical school. I found it thoroughly inspiring and every bit as creative and intellectually engaging as my prior work.”

Theater, says Dr. Abramson, is all about teamwork and storytelling—and that sort of communication is at the very heart of medicine. “Our biggest role as physicians is as teachers for our patients, helping them understand and become active partners and leaders in their quest for wellness.”

Humanistic Medicine

“From day one at Mount Sinai, there was an incredible focus on the core quality of doctor-patient communication.” Dr. Abramson remembers with particular warmth Arthur Rubenstein, MD, the dean of the School at that time, whom many saw as the model of a great medical researcher as

well as an idealistic, humanistic physician. Dr. Rubenstein took time each week to sit with senior students, reading and discussing works on the philosophy of medicine.

“It was ingrained in my Mount Sinai training that our connections with our patients at a human level make us better physicians and also help us take maximal gratification in our own work,” says Dr. Abramson.

Understanding patients’ hopes and fears aids in research as well, helping to identify shortcomings in the standard of care. When asking patients to join clinical trials, researchers need to explain clearly both the goals and the risks of the trial and how patients can help further scientific knowledge. With this understanding, patients are usually excited to contribute to the broader effort.

Easing the Fear

His early experiences caring for cancer patients as an internal medicine resident at Mount Sinai convinced Dr. Abramson to become an oncologist. “I witnessed the panic that accompanies a cancer diagnosis,” he recalls. But he also saw the comfort that accompanied discussions with expert oncologists, a treatment plan, and effective therapy.

“From my perspective, interacting as I do with students from all the finest medical schools in the country, Mount Sinai students are always the cream of the crop.”

– Jeremy Abramson, MD, ISMMS ’00

“Life doesn’t go on pause while you fight cancer,” says Dr. Abramson. “We help people find the strength and mechanisms to deal with this in the context of their lives, not instead of their lives.”

Dr. Abramson’s first teaching experience was at Mount Sinai as a teaching assistant in gross anatomy, and he delighted in the small group Socratic teaching method. That early experience molded his current clinical practice and his role teaching Harvard medical students, internal medicine residents, and hematology oncology fellows.

He also participated in the community service programs, such as outreach to the homeless, that are part of Mount Sinai’s commitment to all of its neighbors—whether they come from an elegant building on Madison Avenue or a local shelter. »

“I see Mount Sinai students when they graduate and arrive at Mass General as newly minted interns in medicine,” he says. “From my perspective, interacting as I do with students from all the finest medical schools in the country, Mount Sinai students are always the cream of the crop. They are well rounded, passionate, thoughtful, intelligent, compassionate physicians the day

‘Figuring Out What the Future Is Going to Be’

“I think my fellows call me fair, my fellows call me tough… and a lot of them call me mom.” So says Joan Reede ISMMS ’80, MD, MPH, MS, MBA. Dean for Diversity and Community Partnership and Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Dr. Reede is the first AfricanAmerican woman to be a dean at the school. Her fellows are far from the only ones to applaud Dr. Reede‘s warmth and commitment. In March, she was honored with one of Mount Sinai’s highest honors: the Jacobi Medallion, given to those who exemplify Mount Sinai’s commitment to compassionate care and the advancement of medicine. Dr. Reede was recognized for the development and management of a comprehensive program that provides leadership, guidance, and support to promote diversity and inclusion at HMS.

At Harvard, Dr. Reede has founded more than 20 programs that target individuals from groups underrepresented in medicine. She is the director of the Minority Faculty Development Program, faculty director of Community Outreach Programs, and founder and president of the Biomedical Science Careers Program.

Anyone would take pride in such a résumé, but Dr. Reede is the first to point out that she didn’t get there alone.

they arrive and become, I think, wonderful physicians and leaders during their time here. Oftentimes they go on into great academic careers, become chief residents in medicine, then become leaders in their respective fields.”

Dr. Abramson is now seeking to improve lymphoma outcomes in Botswana, where he has a medical license and sees patients

in the public cancer hospital. He is seeking grants to expand the basic treatment infrastructure and bring care to the underserved. This is the very essence of Mount Sinai, says Dr. Abramson. “It has a heart. It’s a school that speaks to physicians who truly endeavor to make the world a better place.”

— Alison Dalton

Dr. Reede’s parents always supported her in her goals. Her mother was deeply involved in social issues, from teaching Sunday school to working with senior citizens. She taught her daughter that you can and should do something with your life.

“I’m here because of other people who opened the door—the people who helped me to get into Brown, the faculty at Mount Sinai, particularly Horace Hodes, and many others,” she says, referring to the legendary researcher, pediatrician, and teacher. “Horace Hodes was the embodiment of the great scientist and the great clinician, and at the same time he could have a conversation with me about poverty and what we now call the social determinacy of health, and how important that was.”

Why Inclusion Matters

Inclusion is not just “a nice idea,” says Dr. Reede. Instead, it is both necessary and beneficial in a multicultural society. “Different students ask different questions,” she says, adding that science moves forward when people are challenged in their beliefs. “Diverse individuals in organizations help those organizations better meet the needs of a diverse society.”

Health care in this country is changing fast, and Dr. Reede, for one, likes that idea.

“It’s exciting when the landscape is shifting and people aren’t sure where we’re headed. That’s the space I love. Not just trying to undo the past, but figuring out what the future is going to be.”

One of those changes will be the way medicine is taught. “We need to train students who are able to work with patients who are very, very diverse in their socioeconomic backgrounds, their immigration status, their cultures.“

Health care venues will change, too, according to Dr. Reede. Health care practitioners will have to go into the community, where patients live or work. Care will necessarily be delivered in tertiary care centers.

Seeing Inequity

Dr. Reede saw the effects of inequity at an early age. “I knew that when I visited my grandmother, the white side of the street up to the railroad track was paved and the other side wasn’t,” she recalls. She saw people in the community die because they didn’t have access to care and their illnesses were diagnosed far too late.

From an early age she felt a responsibility to use her abilities to help others. “I found medicine. At first I thought I’d be a nurse, because all the women were nurses in the books I read. And then I said wait a minute--the doctors are in charge, and I want to be in charge, so I’ll be a doctor.”

Dr. Reede’s parents always supported her in her goals. Her mother was deeply involved in social issues, from teaching Sunday school to working with senior citizens. She taught her daughter that you can and should do something with your life.

When asked what she’s most proud of, Dr. Reede doesn’t hesitate: “My daughter and my grandchildren. They are the best thing in the world.”

Mount Sinai’s Legacy

Much of what Dr. Reede knows about community she learned at Mount Sinai. “I did everything from working with Dr. [Lucille Constance] Gunning at Harlem Hospital in Pediatric Rehab, to making home visits with visiting nurses, to an externship at Mount Sinai in Buford, South Carolina, going with social workers on home visits in the Elk Islands.” That early experience continues to inform her work today.

Often Dr. Reede’s fellows come in with a particular interest in specific populations, but they walk away with an understanding that many problems are shared and need to be worked on jointly. Says Dr. Reede, “It’s not about how we divide up the pie, it’s about how a collective rises together.”

Speaking of rising: “What do I think is really cool?” she asks. “That someone whose grandmother was raised by a woman who was a slave is a dean at Harvard.”

— Alison Dalton

From the Director of Alumni Relations and Annual Giving

I am proud to write to you about the wonderful things going on at Mount Sinai and the powerful connections alumni are making with each other and with the School. Our robust online initiatives make it easier than ever to build your network. We have added the official Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai LinkedIn University page and expanded on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Find these on our alumni website, alumni.icahn.mssm.edu. Scholarships continue to hold critical importance to our community, to ensure a diverse student body and ease the debt burden our graduates face when they begin their careers. We rely on support from alumni who know the value of a Mount Sinai education to support the Alumni Endowed Scholarship Fund, which gives crucial financial assistance to extraordinary students. For those able to give leadership gifts, we have recently launched the Society for Alumni Leaders to recognize their generous investment in the next generation of medical leaders.

I am honored to work with an alumni group that, individually and together, transforms the health care industry, leads innovative scientific research, delivers the highest quality clinical care, and steadfastly advocates for the underserved. Please contact us at alumni@mssm.edu with questions, comments or suggestions on how to enhance our community’s connections.

THE PARENTS COUNCIL

Extending the Mount Sinai Family for Generations

“ We are proud to support a scholarship program that attracts the best applicants to Mount Sinai and helps qualified medical students receive the education they deserve. Parents and families play a central role in building Mount Sinai’s legacy of excellence, and we encourage all families to get involved through the Parents Endowed Scholarship Fund.”

Please consider joining the Parents Council with a generous gift of $25,000 or more, along with invaluable contributions of time, expertise, and influence, to support scholarships at Mount Sinai. In addition to meeting annually and hosting one fall event, members of the Parents Council collaborate with school leadership throughout the year to enhance the Mount Sinai parent experience in the areas of their interest.

FOR MORE INFORMATION: Please contact Anastasia Hagan, Director of Development, at anastasia.hagan@mountsinai.org.

MOUNT SINAI’S DISTINGUISHED

PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE

More than 100 alumni and guests convened for Reunion 2015 to connect with one another and hear from current students, faculty, and David Muller, MD, MSH ’95, Dean for Medical Education, about developments at the School and in the industry. Current students held a panel discussion that covered the evolving medical school curriculum, innovative research, and the future of medicine—providing a snapshot of what it means to be an Icahn student today. Faculty members spoke about teaching compassion in a high-tech world, brand names versus generics, and the role of environmental stressors in disease.

PICTURED:

REUNION 2016

Friday, May 13, 2016

We would love to see you there

1. Members of the Class of 1995 celebrate their 20th reunion.

2. Bridget Matikainen-Ankney, PhD ISMMS ’17. 3. (L-R) Scott Steinberg, MD ISMMS ’95, Jeffrey Knispel, MD ISMMS ’95, Will Samson, MD ISMMS ’95. 4. Alisan Goldfarb, MD ISMMS ’75, MSH ’76 and Lyris Schonholz, MD ISMMS ’83. 5. Members of the ISMMS Class of 1990 reconnect at their 25th reunion. 6. Student panelists (L-R) Carine Davila, MD ISMMS ’16, Kathryn Friedman, MD ISMMS ‘16, Theodore Pak, MD/PhD ISMMS ’20, Bridget Matikainen-Ankney, PhD ISMMS ’17, Zachary Lorsch, MD/PhD ISMMS ’20. 7. (L-R) Cecily Lesko, MD ISMMS ’90, MSH ’91, Marc Sher, MD ISMMS ’90, Nancy Lippman, MD ISMMS ’90, MSH ’95, Andy Sandler, MD ISMMS ’90.

In Memoriam

Mount Sinai Science & Medicine

salutes five Trustees who died since the publication of our last issue. We extend our deepest condolences to their family and friends.

Milton Cohn, provided insights to member hospitals for more than 40 years, first as a Trustee of the former Beth Israel Medical Center, then as a Trustee of Continuum Health Partners and emeritus member of the Board of Overseers of Mount Sinai Beth Israel and Mount Sinai Roosevelt. He was a loyal supporter of various programs at Beth Israel, including digestive diseases and psychiatry.

Morton P. Hyman, a Senior Vice Chairman of the Mount Sinai Boards of Trustees, gave more than 40 years of service: as Founding Chairman Emeritus of Continuum

continued from page 14

Recognition &Awards

Alex Manini, MD, MS, Associate Professor; Fellow, American College of Medical Toxicology; Gallery of Excellence 2014, Society for Academic Emergency Medicine; Top Consultant, Annals of Emergency Medicine; Grand Rounds, Cleveland Clinic; Keynote Speaker and Session Chair, 34th International Congress, European Association of Clinical Toxicologists and Poison Centres

Kevin G. Munjal, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor; Chair, Emergency Medical Services Interest Group, Society of Academic Emergency Medicine

Bret Nelson, MD, Associate Professor; National Faculty Teaching Award, American College of Emergency Physicians; Emergency Ultrasound Education Award, Society for Academic Emergency Medicine; Chair, Emergency and Critical Care Community of Practice, American Institute of Ultrasound in Medicine

Lynne D. Richardson, MD, Professor; National Advisory Committee, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholars Program

Scott Weingart, MD, Associate Professor; Director, Emergency Neurological Life Support

Health Partners; Chairman, Board of Trustees, Beth Israel Medical Center; Chairman, Board of Trustees, St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital Center; Vice Chairman, Board of Directors, New York Eye and Ear Infirmary; and, most recently, as a member of the Executive Committee and Chair of the Government Affairs Committee at the Mount Sinai Health System. Mort and his wife, Chris Stern, generously supported important patient care and surgical initiatives, among many others.

Patricia S. Levinson, a member of the Mount Sinai Boards of Trustees since 1981, brought insights and generosity that touched many areas of the Health System. A champion of students, she created the Robert and Patricia Levinson Student Center and endowed scholarships and fellowships at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Pat also co-chaired the advisory board of the Center for Multicultural Affairs, was a longtime member of The Mount Sinai Hospital’s Auxiliary Board, and supported nursing, social services,

Course, Neurocritical Care Society; Keynote Speaker, Gold Coast Conference, Brisbane, Australia, Social Media and Critical Care

Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences

Brian Brown, PhD, Associate Professor; 2014 Outstanding New Investigator Award, American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy

Joel Dudley, PhD, Assistant Professor; Top 100 Most Creative People of 2014, Fast Company Magazine

Ethylin Jabs, MD, Professor; Society of Scholars, Johns Hopkins University

Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine

Rosanne Leipzig, MD, Professor; Chair, Geriatrics Working Group, United States Preventive Services Task Force; 2013 Lorraine Sulkin Schein Lecture in Geriatric Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern; Visiting Professor, University of North Texas Health Science Center

Martine Sanon, MD, Assistant Professor; “GEDI WISE: A CMS Health Care Innovation Award Program to Improve Geriatric ED Care,” and Ollie

and Linkage House, a home for the elderly. Her son, Drew, created the ADS-Dreams Come True Fund, which raises funds for terminally ill children at the Hospital.

Arthur Sarnoff served our hospitals for more than 40 years, first as a Trustee of the former Beth Israel Medical Center, then as a Trustee of Continuum Health Partners.

With his wife, Trustee Joan Sarnoff, Arthur supported key programs including the Mount Sinai Roosevelt Emergency Department.

Maury L. Spanier was, for more than 40 years, a devoted volunteer leader for our hospitals. He was a Trustee and Member of the Executive Committee of the former Beth Israel Medical Center and later a Trustee of Continuum Health Partners. He provided generous support to a variety of initiatives including psychiatry and complementary medicine.

Randall Award, Gerontological Society of America Annual Meeting

Theresa Soriano, MD, MPH, Associate Professor; Elected Director, American Academy of Home Care Medicine

Global Health and Emerging Pathogens Institute

Adolfo Garcia-Sastre, PhD, Director and Professor; Organizer, 2013 International Society for Vaccines; Organizer, 2014 Keystone Symposia on Respiratory Virus Pathogenesis; President, International Society for Vaccines

Mindich Health and Development Institute

Bruce D. Gelb, MD, Director and Professor; 2014 Arnold W. Strauss Visiting Professor, Monroe Carell Jr. Children’s Hospital at Vanderbilt University Medical Center

Mount Sinai Heart

Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, Director and Physicianin-Chief; Ron Haddock International Impact Achievement Award, American Heart Association; Health Care Delivery Excellence Award, European Institute of Health and Welfare; Arthur S. Agatston

Recognition &Awards

Award in Cardiovascular Disease Prevention, Society of Cardiovascular Computer Tomography; Marqués of Fuster and Camino Real Awards, King Juan Carlos I and Crown Prince Felipe of Spain; Opening Address, XXIV Inter-American Congress of Cardiology; Keynote Speaker, 12th Annual Cardiovascular Disease Prevention Symposium; Closing Address, Congreso Annual de Cardiologia Internacional; Opening Address, American Heart Association Life Sciences Innovation Forum; Keynote Speaker, Association of Black Cardiologists 40th Anniversary Scientific Sessions Lecture; Incoming Editor-in-Chief, Journal of the American College of Cardiology; Opening Address, 2014 CHEST World Congress; State-ofthe-Art Lecture, 2014 Mayo Clinic Conference; Closing Keynote Address, Lancet Symposium, Royal College of Physicians, London; Keynote Speaker, 2014 Preventive Cardiovascular Nurses Association Annual Symposium; 2014 Frontiers in Science Award and Opening Address, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists’ 23rd Annual Scientific and Clinical Congress; Opening Address, International Weinstein Conference on Cardiovascular Development

Immunology Institute

Sergio Lira, MD, PhD, Director and Professor; Visiting Professor, Southern Medical University, Guangzhou, China

Department of Medical Education

Reena Karani, MD, MHPE, Associate Professor; Chair, Education Committee, Society of General Internal Medicine; Co-Chair, Step 2CS Test Development Committee, National Board of Medical Examiners

Jeffrey T. Laitman, PhD, Professor; Henry Gray Distinguished Educator Medal and Henry Gray Plenary Lecture, American Association of Anatomists Experimental Biology Conference; Elected Honorary Member, American Society of Pediatric Otolaryngology; Councilor, Board of Directors, Association of Anatomy, Cell Biology, Neurobiology Chairs; Nominating Committee, International Federation of Associations of Anatomy; Benning Lecturer, University of Utah School of Medicine; Chair, Nominations Committee, American Association of Anatomists; Scientific Advisory Board, Musee d’Anthropologie Prehistorique de Monaco; Special Lecture, Hull-York Medical School, York, England; Harpur Science Forum Lecture, Bedford School, Bedfordshire, England; International Hobbes Association; University Lecture on Teaching, Ethics and Religion, Brigham Young University

Joy Reidenberg, PhD, Professor; Robert T. Wong, MD Endowed Lectureship on Research in Medicine, John A. Burns School of Medicine, University of Hawaii; Geneva Sayre Lecture on Women in Science, Russell Sage College

Samuel Bronfman Department of Medicine

Judith Aberg, MD, Professor; HIV Medicine Association Liaison to Board of Directors, Infectious Diseases Society of America; Keynote Speaker, 7th Annual Advanced Management Issues in HIV Medicine, Cleveland Clinic

Louis Aledort, MD, Professor; Honorary Doctorate in Medicine, University of Lund, Sweden

Joshua Brody, MD, Assistant Professor; 2014 Clinical Investigator Award, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation; Clinical Research Mentorship Award, Lymphoma Research Foundation

Christoph Buettner, MD, PhD, Associate Professor; Keynote Speaker, German Diabetes Association Annual Meeting; Keynote Speaker, Emory University Diabetes Symposium

Dennis Chang, MD, Assistant Professor; Keynote Speaker, American College of Physicians Scientific Meeting

Barry S. Coller, MD, Clinical Professor; Karl Landsteiner Award, Association of American Blood Banks

Charlotte Cunningham-Rundles, MD, PhD, Professor; 2014 Distinguished Clinician Award, American Association of Asthma Allergy and Immunology; Keynote Speaker, Annual Congress of the Swiss Society of Allergy and Immunology

Demetre Daskalakis, MD, Associate Professor; Chair, Strategic Planning Committee, Gay Men’s Health Crisis; 100 Most Prominent and Influential LGBT People 2013, OUT Magazine; Keynote Speaker, Treatment Action Group

Andrew Dunn, MD, MPH, Professor; Chair-Elect, Board of Governors, American College of Physicians

Adolfo Garcia Ocana, PhD, Professor; Editorial Board, Journal Biological Chemistry

Donald Gardenier, DNP, FNP-BC, Assistant Professor; Fellow, American Association of Nurse Practitioners

John Cijiang He, MD, PhD, Professor; Member, American Society of Clinical Investigation

Joseph Kannry, MD, Professor; 2013 Leadership Award, American Medical Informatics Association

Jenny J. Lin, MD, MPH, Associate Professor; 2014 Best Poster, Distinguished Professor Program in Cancer Research, Society of General Internal Medicine

Jeffrey Mechanick, MD, Clinical Professor; President, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists

Barbara Murphy, MD, Chair and Professor; Chair, World Transplant Congress 2014; Member, Interurban Clinical Club; Honorary Degree, University College Dublin

Judith Nelson, MD, Professor; Keynote Speaker, Care for Hospitalists and Intensivists Course, Harvard Medical School

Natalia Nieto, MSc, PharmD., PhD, Associate Professor; 2014 Fomento Alumni Medal, Fomento de Centros de Enseñanza (Spain)

Lauren Peccoralo, MD, MPH, Assistant Professor; 2014 Mid-Atlantic Clinician Educator Award and Best Research Abstract Faculty Poster Presentation, Society of General Internal Medicine

Charles A. Powell, MD, Professor; Thoracic Oncology Assembly, American Thoracic Society; Keynote Speaker, Tottori University School of Medicine, Yonago, Japan

Nadim Salomon, MD, Professor; Keynote Speaker, Association of Haitian Physicians Abroad Symposium

Neil Schachter, PhD, Professor; Board of Directors, American Lung Association of the North East; Board of Directors, Leadership Council American Lung Association City of New York; Chairman, Clinical Advisory Committee, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Foundation; Chairman, Grants Committee, American Lung Association of the North East; Organizing Committee, 2014 Lung Cancer Summit, American Lung Association of the North East

Donald Scott, PhD, Professor; Editorial Board, Journal of Biological Chemistry

Emilia M. Sordillo, MD, PhD, Associate Clinical Professor; Fellow, American College of Physicians January 2014

Andrew Stewart, MD, Professor; Harold Rifkin Visiting Professorship Award and Lecture, Albert Einstein College of Medicine; Ray Kroc Scientific Award and Lecture, University of Uppsala Diabetes Center

Ronald Tamler, MD, Associate Professor; Board Member, Endocrine Fellows Foundation

David C. Thomas, MD, MHPE, Professor; Chair, 2015 Meeting, Society of General Internal Medicine

Yaron Tomer, MD, Professor; Elected Member, Interurban Clinical Club

Thomas Ullman, MD, Associate Professor; Keynote Speaker, Inflammatory Bowel Disease Symposium, New Zealand Society of Gastroenterology; Co-Chair, Membership Committee, Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America

Christopher Walsh, MD, Associate Professor; Charles Hamilton Legacy Award, Hemophilia Federation of America

Robert Yanagisawa, MD, Associate Professor; Vice President and Co-Chair of Mentorship Program, Japanese Medical Society of America

Mone Zaidi, MD, Professor; Secretary-Treasurer, Interurban Clinical Club

Department of Microbiology

Christopher Basler, PhD, Professor; Fellow, American Academy of Microbiology

Matthew Evans, PhD, Assistant Professor, Kavli Fellow, Kavli Foundation and the National Academy of Sciences

Benhur Lee, PhD, Professor; Keynote Speaker, Molecular Microbiology and Immunology Annual Retreat, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California

Peter Palese, PhD, Chair and Professor; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Honorary Doctorate, Baylor College of Medicine

Benjamin tenOever, PhD, Professor; Fulbright-Tocqueville Distinguished Chair Award, Fulbright Commission; Young Investigator Award and Keynote Speaker, Annual Meeting, American Society of Virology

Domenico Tortorella, PhD, Associate Professor; Co-Chair, Immunology Study Section, American Heart Association; Keynote Speaker, Ploegh Symposium, Whitehead Institute

Estelle and Daniel Maggin Department of Neurology

Steven J. Frucht, MD, Professor; 2014 Michael Ty, MD, Memorial Lecture, Partners Neurology, Massachusetts General Hospital, Brigham and Women’s Hospital of Harvard Medical School; 2014 Jerome Block, MD, Endowed Lecture, Lenox Hill Hospital

Stephen Krieger, MD, Assistant Professor; Director, Kickoff Program on Multiple Sclerosis Essentials, American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting; Keynote Speaker, National Multiple Sclerosis Society Annual Meeting and Education Conference; Member, Board of Directors; Chair, Grants Committee, Multiple Sclerosis Hope for a Cure

Fred D. Lublin, MD, Professor; Keynote Speaker, National Multiple Sclerosis Annual Meetings, Southern California and New York City-Southern New York Chapters; Keynote Speaker, Multiple Sclerosis Experts’ Summit, Barcelona

Jessica Robinson-Papp, MD, Assistant Professor; Emerging Leaders Forum, American Academy of Neurology

Fishberg Department of Neuroscience

Patrizia Casaccia, MD, PhD, Professor; Plenary Lecture, 24th International Symposium on Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis; Chair, Gordon Research Conference; Keynote Speaker, International Society for Neurochemistry Satellite Meeting; Keynote Speaker, 2014 Northeast Regional Sigma XI Conference; Chair, New York Bio Panel on Multiple Sclerosis

Alison Goate, DPhil, Professor; Khalid Iqbal Lifetime Achievement Award in Alzheimer’s Disease Research, Alzheimer’s Association

Department of Neurosurgery

Kalmon Post, MD, Professor; Best Journal Reviewer, Pituitary

Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Services

Lois Brustman, MD, Associate Professor; 2014 National Faculty Award, Council on Resident Education in Obstetrics and Gynecology, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists

Peter McGovern, MD, Professor; Clinical Director, Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology

Laura MacIsaac, MD, Associate Professor; Keynote Speaker, District II Annual Clinical Meeting and Chair, Long Acting Contraception Task Force, American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology

Farr Nezhat, MD, Professor; President, Fellowship Board, American Association of Gynecologic Laparoscopists; Keynote Speaker, 2nd World Symposium on Endometriosis

Barak Rosenn, MD, Professor; President, New York Obstetrical Society

Department of Ophthalmology

Penny Asbell, MD, Professor; Editor-in-Chief, Contact Lens Association of Ophthalmologists; Conferencia Magistral “Dr. Diego Cuevas Cancino,” XIX Curso Internacional de Córnea y Cirugía Refractiva; Keynote Speaker, Annual Meeting, Tear Film and Ocular Surface Society

Scott Brodie, MD, PhD, Professor; Chair, Symposium Editorial Committee, International Society for Clinical Electrophysiology of Vision

Carlo Iomini, PhD, Assistant Professor; Dolly Green Special Scholar Award, Research to Prevent Blindness

Douglas A. Jabs, MD, MBA, Chair and Professor; Board of Directors, American Uveitis Society; Gold Medal Lecture, Saudi Ophthalmological Society

Leni and Peter W. May Department of Orthopaedics

Steven Z. Glickel, MD, Clinical Professor; Paul Lipscomb Distinguished Lecturer, University of California at Davis Department of Orthopaedic Surgery; Chair, Ethics and Professionalism Committee, American Society for Surgery of the Hand

William G. Hamilton, MD, Clinical Professor; Mr. and Mrs. J. Elmer Nix Ethics Award, Clinical Orthopaedic Society

Department of Otolaryngology

Daniel Buchbinder, DMD, MD, Professor; Keynote Speaker, Brazilian Society of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons; Speaker, Turkish Society of Oral and

Maxillofacial Surgeons; Keynote Speaker, International Congress on Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery; Visiting Professor, University of Alabama; Visiting Professor, Washington University in St. Louis; Fellowship, American Academy of Carniomaxillofacial Surgery

Cathy Lazarus, PhD, Associate Professor; Board President, International Dysphagia Research Society

Michael Pitman, MD, Associate Professor; Fellow, American Laryngological Association

Michael Rothschild, MD, Clinical Professor; Chevalier Jackson Award, American Bronchoesophagological Association

Anthony P. Sclafani, MD, Professor; Program Chair, 11th International Symposium of Facial Plastic Surgery, American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery; Director-at-Large, American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

Michael Turner, MD, Assistant Professor; Fellowship, American Academy of Craniomaxillofacial Surgery

Lillian and Henry M. Stratton-Hans Popper Department of Pathology

Janina A. Longtine MD, Professor; President, Association for Molecular Pathology

Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics

Edward E. Conway Jr., MS, MD, Professor; Chair, Executive Section of Pediatric Critical Care Medicine, American Academy of Pediatrics; Regent, American College of Critical Care Medicine, Society of Critical Care Medicine

Allison Gault, MD, Assistant Professor; 2014 Leonard Tow Humanism in Medicine Award, Arnold P. Gold Foundation

Kurt Hirschhorn, MD, Professor; Victor McKusick Leadership Award, American Society of Human Genetics

Xiu-Min Li, MD, Professor; Commencement Speech, New York College of Traditional Chinese Medicine; Chair, Organizing Committee, Building Bridges for Traditional Chinese Medicine

Maria I. New, MD, Professor; 2014 Endocrine Regulations Prize, Ipsen Foundation

Robert Rapaport, MD, Professor; Chair, Pediatric Endocrinology Scientific Committee, American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists

Hugh A. Sampson, MD, Professor; Distinguished Scientist Award, American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology

Lisa M. Satlin, MD, Chair and Professor; Barry M. Brenner Endowed Lectureship, American Society of Nephrology

Scott H. Sicherer, MD, Professor; Chair, American Board of Allergy and Immunology

Recognition &Awards

Julie Wang, MD, Associate Professor; Chair, Complementary and Alternative Practices in Allergy Committee and Vice Chair, Anaphylaxis Committee, American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology

Dorothy H. and Lewis Rosenstiel Department of Pharmacology and Systems Therapeutics

Lakshmi A. Devi, PhD, Professor; Keynote Speaker, Mid-Atlantic Pharmacology Society Meeting, Philadelphia; Symposium Chair, International Narcotics Research Conference, Queensland, Australia; Secretary-Treasurer, Neuropharmacology Division, American Society for Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics

Department of Population Health Science and Policy

Deborah Ascheim, MD, Associate Professor; Chair, Board of Directors, Physicians for Human Rights

Nina Bickell, MD, MPH, Professor; Chair, Disparities Educational Session, American Society of Clinical Oncology Annual Meeting

Annetine Gelijns, PhD, Professor; Editorial Board, Journal of the American College of Cardiology

Carol Horowitz, MD, MPH, Associate Professor; Co-Chair, Measurement Committee, Implementing Genomics in Practice Network; Associate Editor, Special Issue, Progress in Community Health Partnerships Journal

Elizabeth Howell, MD, MPP, Associate Professor; Keynote Speaker, California Maternal Mental Health Collaborative; Editorial Board, 2014, National Institutes of Health Director’s Early Independence Award Program

Lawrence Kleinman, MD, MPH, Associate Professor; Keynote Speaker, Jack and Lucy Clark Department of Pediatrics Research Day, Rutgers Medical School; Co-Chair, Measures and Metrics Planning Committee, Outcomes Work Group of the Community Engagement Core, Clinical and Translational Science Awards Consortium, National Center for Advancing Translational Science; Chair, Science and Feasibility Working Group, Pediatric Quality Measures Program, Agency for Health Research and Quality

Michael K. Parides, PhD, Professor; Member, Editorial Board, Stroke Journal

Jashvant Poeran, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor; Best of Meeting Abstract Presentation, American Society of Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine 39th Annual Meeting

Department of Preventive Medicine

Manish Arora, MD, Assistant Professor; International Fellow, International College of Dentists

Holly Atkinson, MD, Assistant Professor; Co-Chair, Physicians Against Human Trafficking Committee, American Medical Women’s Association

Philip J. Landrigan, MD, MSc, Chair and Professor; President, Collegium Ramazzini

Department of Psychiatry

Samuel Basch, MD, Clinical Professor; Distinguished Life Fellow, American Psychiatric Association

Kristen Brennand, PhD, Assistant Professor; Associate Membership, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology

Samuel E. Gandy, MD, Professor in Alzheimer’s Research; Chair, Cure Alzheimer’s Fund Worldwide Stem Cell Consortium; Neurodegeneration Section, Journal of the American College of Cardiology; Plenary Speaker, Dedication Symposium on Translational Medicine, South Australia Health Ministry Research Institute

Stuart Gitlow, MD, MPH, MBA, Associate Clinical Professor; 2014 Outstanding Service and Leadership Award, National Association of State Alcohol and Drug Abuse Directors

Rita Goldstein, PhD, Professor; Joel P. Waletzky Award, Society for Neuroscience

Alexander Kolevzon, MD, Associate Professor; Outstanding Mentor Award, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry

Kyle Lapidus, MD, PhD, Assistant Professor; Travel Award, American College of Neuropsychopharmacology

Mary Sano, PhD, Professor; Federal Executive Board Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award, Veterans Administration, New York Federal Executive Board; Elected Executive Secretary, Board of Directors, International Psychgeriatric Association; Keynote Speaker, International Psychgeriatric Association, Seoul; Keynote Speaker, Alzheimer Disease International Conference; Keynote Speaker, University of New England Maine Geriatric Education

Larry J. Siever, MD, Professor, 2014 Gold Medal Award, Association for Research in Personality Disorders

Pamela Sklar, MD, PhD, Professor; Membership, Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences

Eli A. Stahl, PhD, Assistant Professor; 2013 NARSAD Young Investigator Award, Brain and Behavior Research Foundation

Department of Radiology

Burton Drayer, MD, Chair and Professor; Chair, Radiological Society of North America Research and Education Foundation; Board of Chancellors, American College of Radiology

Zahi A. Fayad, PhD, Professor; Editor, Imaging Section, Journal of the American College of Cardiology; Visiting Professor, Nanjing University and Zhong Da Hospital, China

Thomas Naidich, MD, Professor; Gold Medal, American Society of Neuroradiology

Bachir Taouli, MD, Professor; Co-Chair, Data Acquisition Group, Quantitative Imaging Network, National Cancer Institute

Ruth J. & Maxwell Hauser and Harriet & Arthur H. Aufses, Jr., MD Department of Surgery

Ernest Benjamin, MD, Professor; Co-Director, Indonesian International Symposium on Shock and Critical Care Medicine; Co-Director, 9th Symposium on Nutri Indonesia

Peter L. Faries, MD, Professor; Editorial Board Member, Journal of Surgery and Transplantation Science

Tomas Heimann, MD, Professor; Chief Surgical Consultant, Greater New York Veterans Affairs System

Daniel M. Herron, MD, Professor; Program Chair, Annual Obesity Week Interdisciplinary Meeting, American Society for Metabolic and Bariatric Surgery; Board of Governors and Chair, Program Committee, Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons

Harvey N. Himel, MD, MPH, Assistant Clinical Professor; Co-Chair, Program Planning Committee, Annual Meeting, Wound Healing Society

Brian Jacob, MD, Associate Clinical Professor; Keynote Speaker, Annual China Hernia Meeting; Keynote Speaker, Annual Meeting, University of Toronto; Member, Board of Governors and Chair, Publications Committee, Society of American Gastrointestinal and Endoscopic Surgeons

John Oropello, MD, Professor; Presidential Citation Award, Society of Critical Care Medicine

Windsor Ting, MD, Assistant Professor; Assistant Editor, Blue News Now Newsletter, American Venous Forum

Department of Thoracic Surgery

Raja M. Flores, MD, Chair and Professor; John Y. Templeton, III Visiting Professor 2014, Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, Philadelphia

The Power of Scholarships

OUR STUDENTS: TALENTED AND DIVERSE

Driving medicine, science, and society forward

n MD, 464

n MD/Masters, 54

n MD/PhD, 90

n PhD, 211

n Masters, 241

• Women, 50%

students

• Underrepresented minorities, 18%

• 60% match to top 20 academic medical centers 2014–2015 figures

HOW YOU HELP

Scholarships change lives

Average student debt upon graduation

$176,348 National

$129,783 Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Scholarships are vital to reducing student debt at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, an investment that advances diversity and expands opportunity for the next generation of health care leaders.

$66,736

Average annual cost of tuition, room, and board

Average per-student scholarship

Need-based: $19,690

Merit and other: $31,187

$5,965,571

Total scholarship funds distributed 2013–2014

Total recipients: 334

Imagine what happens when you invest in Mount Sinai’s brilliant, compassionate students. Imagine the ideas they will generate, the problems they will solve, the lives they will transform. Thank you for your continued support of our programs. When you give to scholarships today, you change what will be achieved tomorrow.”