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Mount Sinai hires Lumeris to boost population-health management

New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System is diving deeper into population health by choosing  St. Louis-based Lumeris to help improve its population-health- management initiatives.

Lumeris’s approach revolves around value-based care.  Nigel Ohrenstein, the company’s senior vice president for Northeast and national accounts, explained to Med City News that  Lumeris’s technology lets providers better manage the health of certain patient populations by  bringing together clinical and financial data to give providers a more complete picture of each patient.

“Our approach is about more than just clinical improvement. It’s about helping healthcare organizations to navigate the transition to the new business of value-based care,” he said.

Niyum Gandhi, Mount Sinai’s executive vice president and chief population health officer, said:

“As we rapidly embrace value-based care as a system, continuously improving our efficiency and quality to improve the overall health of our community is a critical priority. Mount Sinai has identified innovative collaborators to help support us in this journey, and we believe Lumeris can accelerate our ability to effectively and responsibly manage large populations in risk-based models.”

“They had already launched population health initiatives, which had been effective, but they wanted to go further, faster,” Mr. Ohrenstein told Med City News.

He said that Lumeris’s platform is already being launched  at Mount Sinai,  adding that it’s meant to aid the 150,000 patients now managed in risk-based contracts. Mount Sinai plans to double the number of individuals it  covers under value-based arrangements.

To read the Med City article, please hit this link.

 


Mount Sinai launches robotics institute

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A laparoscopic robotic surgery machine.

New York’s Mount Sinai Health System, a pioneer in robotic surgery, has started a robotics institute.

The Mount Sinai Robotics Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine in New York City brings together physicians from different specialties as well as scientists and engineers to study the effectiveness and safety of robotics surgery.

The institute’s  chief goals are, in the words of a Hospital & Health Networks article, “to measure outcomes of robotics surgery compared with non-robotic procedures, to foster innovation with scientists and engineers, and to create a rigorous training facility so that physicians will develop these unique skills and techniques.”

Ash Tewari, MBBS, MCh, the Kyung Hyun Kim Chair of the Milton and Carroll Petrie Department of Urology at Mount Sinai and co-chair of the institute, told H&HN that “Robotics volume is increasing every year and there will be more modalities. Surgeons can integrate data, and superimpose it on a patient’s body and see things they never saw before. With the institute, robotics will grow more but will be more standardized, and training [will be] more supervised.”

To read the whole article, please hit this link.


Mount Sinai’s Beth Israel’s drastic inpatient downsizing

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Beth Israel Hospital at 16th St. in Manhattan.

Mount Sinai Health System will  drastically shrink its Beth Israel Hospital, in New York City, by roughly 785 beds as part of a $500 million system reorganization. Much of the downsizing announcement was expected.  With the system’s announcement also came word that Mount Sinai Beth Israel’s president, Susan Somerville, is resigning after a tenure whose brevity is common in big hospitals these days.

“My husband has retired and I will be joining him in order to pursue new opportunities out East,” Ms. Somerville said. She has only had the Beth Israel job since  2014.

Under the system’s capital project, Beth Israel will slash the number of its beds from 856  to about 70.

Some of Beth Israel’s acute-care services will be transferred to places throughout the network during  the next 18 months.

Mount Sinai’s plan also includes  creating a new network called Mount Sinai Downtown to include expanded and renovated outpatient facilities at three sites with a total of more than 35 operating and procedure rooms,  and 16 physician practice locations consisting of  a total of more than 600 physicians.

To read more, please hit this link.

 


Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital to be closed

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Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital, on 16th Street in Manhattan.

In a dramatic sign of the inpatient-hospital over-capacity challenge, New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System will close 856-bed Mount Sinai Beth Israel  Hospital and replace it with a 70-bed facility.

Mount Sinai said less than  “60 percent of the hospital’s beds are occupied, on average, and patient volume at the financially troubled hospital has decreased by double digits since 2012,” Becker’s Hospital Review reported.

Beth Israel and its affiliates have lost hundreds of millions of dollars over the past few years. In  2015’s first nine months, the teaching hospital had  an $85.6 million loss, which exceeded a budgeted loss of $75.6 million.

The system will invest $500 million to replace Mount Sinai Beth Israel with the smaller facility, two blocks from the current campus. Funds will also be used to expand primary, specialty, behavioral and outpatient surgery services.

The plan to transform Beth Israel will take four years, during which the current hospital will remain open.


Trying to rescue ailing Brooklyn hospitals

 

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— Photo by Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center

Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, in Brooklyn.

 

Becker’s Hospital Review reports on New York State’s efforts to rescue financially troubled hospitals in Brooklyn with millions of dollars in  state support,  including $325 million in 2015. At a recent state budget hearing, Kenneth Raske, president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, made a proposal to help the distressed hospitals survive long term.

The state’s Department of Health says there are 28 Brooklyn hospitals that would likely close without their safety-net status, government subsidies and political pressure.

So Mr. Raske proposed that the state pay the wealthiest hospital systems $2.5 billion over five years to “adopt and adapt these facilities to the new world.”

Becker’s reports that “some large health systems, including New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System and Great Neck, N.Y.-based Northwell Health, want to expand their presence in Brooklyn, making Mr. Raske’s plan popular among the hospitals in desperate need of the financial help.”

“Places like central Brooklyn that don’t have the more attractive payer mix are in a position where it’s more of a challenge to get a larger system interested,” Linda Brady, M.D., president and CEO of Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center, in Brooklyn, told Becker’s.

“This is exactly why the governor put this in his budget proposal, and it’s why Ken Raske is advocating for this.”

 

 


Tips for a successful hospital CIO tenure

Kumar Chatani, chief information officer  and executive vice president of New York-based Mount Sinai Health System, shares his approach to CIO leadership with Becker’s Hospital Review. His suggestions  (and some of this is paraphrased by Becker’s) include:

1. Think of yourself as a service provider.Information technology touches and supports nearly every role in a healthcare organization from the C-suite to clinicians to patients. CIOs are at the forefront of IT.

2. Know how to communicate. “Avoid IT jargon: speak directly and simply,” he says.

3. Play an active role in on-boarding new leaders. Hospital leadership is subject to turnover and the C-suite will constantly have new members.  When someone new joins the organization, extend a helping hand.

4. Be prepared for your role to evolve. For the past decade, IT has migrated from a back office function to deeply impacting how healthcare is delivered. This trend will continue in healthcare, affecting how CIOs operate. “The role will blur and spread deeper into business operations,” he predicts.

 

 

 


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