"Dr. New York"

Read a great article in the New York Times on Dr. Herbert Pardes who is President of the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System. The historical information in the article is fascinating as is the delineation of the challenges inherent in trying to bring two major health care institutions into one system. From the article:

In taking the helm of NewYork-Presbyterian, Dr. Pardes, the nation’s first psychiatrist to run a major medical center and hospital, encountered a corporate version of a dispirited patient plopped on his sofa. The merged entity he inherited was gargantuan, its work force able to fill three Madison Square Gardens. Its organizational chart — with 52 hospitals, nursing facilities and specialty care centers and five campuses — was labyrinthine.

Dr. Pardes’s turnaround strategy, by comparison, was relatively simple: restructure the management team to make hospital administrators more nimble and accountable for performance, root out excessive spending to improve profit margins and bolster revenue by becoming the hospital of choice in the city.

As it turned out, the hospital’s most dire issue was cultural, Dr. Pardes said. Worried about losing power in the merged enterprise, for example, physicians from each predecessor hospital had banded together and refused to relinquish any area of care to the other hospital. Dr. Pardes was witnessing similar tensions play out in 1998 when Mount Sinai and New York University Hospital fused their medical schools.

Click here to read the article.