Seeking Community Panelists

Do you want to get involved in the NYC budget process? TranspareNYC is looking for community panelists to help decide where 1 million dollars in community grants will go. Last year, $907,798 was awarded to 167 organizations, including 36 new programs. The Manhattan Borough President’s office is specifically looking for people who display knowledge in Senior Services, Education, Urban Health Initiatives,

Re-entry and Correctional Systems, and Parks and Recreation. Those interested can visit TranspareNYC.org, and the recruitment drive for prospective panelists ends on March 29th. Questions about the program can be directed to Linda Felstein at (212) 669-4814 or LFelstein@manhattanbp.org.

Salvador Dali Watercolor Thief   

A man has been indicted and charged with Grand Larceny to the Second Degree, after stealing a 1949 Salvador Dali Watercolor from a Manhattan art gallery. On June 19th, 2012, Phivos Istavrioglou stole the drawing (with an estimated worth of $150,000) by placing it in a shopping bag. After surveillance images of the suspect were broadcast to the public worldwide, the NYPD recovered the stolen artwork in a shipping tube at Kennedy Airport less than 2 weeks later. They lifted fingerprints from the shipment and matched them with those from a juice bottle Istavrioglou stole at a Whole Foods last year. On February 16th, 2013, an undercover cop posing as a business manager of an art gallery lured Istavrioglou to NYC. He was taken into custody upon arrival at Kennedy.

 New York-Presbyterian Cancer Study

The American Cancer society is soon to begin its Cancer Prevention Study-3, which will help researchers better understand the factors that cause or prevent cancer. These studies have confirmed the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer, and also the impact of air pollution on the heart and lungs. For residents of East Midtown that would like to get involved, New York-Presbyterian is available as a local registration site.

MOUNT SINAI AND CONTINUUM HEALTH PARTNERS TO MERGE

The Board of Trustees from The Mount Sinai Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners have voted to approve a memorandum of understanding (MOU) for a possible merger.

The MOU outlines steps toward creating a new integrated health care system that combines operations of two entities.

“Our goal as an integrated health care system is to provide exceptional medical care to New Yorkers,” said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Mount Sinai Medical Center. “The combination will create more economies of scale, increase efficiencies, and expand access to advanced primary and specialty care throughout this citywide network.”

Stanley Brezenoff, President and Chief Executive Officer of Continuum, said, “This collaboration makes available an extraordinary range of resources for the provision of compassionate, state-of-the-art care for patients. In joining with Mount Sinai, we will further enhance our ability to provide the full spectrum of outstanding care to the populations we serve.”

Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs of The Mount Sinai Medical Center, sees the opportunity for increased research collaboration with physicians and scientists affiliated with Continuum, who would become part of the medical school’s academic faculty. “Mount Sinai has a legacy of groundbreaking clinical and translational research that has led to improved methods of diagnosing and treating human disease,” said Dr. Charney. “The synergy between Mount Sinai and Continuum would widen our research base and accelerate the pace of breakthrough treatments and protocols.”

The chairmen of both boards of trustees, Peter W. May for Mount Sinai and Steven Hochberg for Continuum, said they are pleased that their respective boards unanimously approved the MOU.

The Mount Sinai Medical Center encompasses both The Mount Sinai Hospital and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Established in 1968, the Icahn School of Medicine is one of the leading medical schools in the United States, and is noted for innovation in education, biomedical research, clinical care delivery, and local and global community service.

Continuum Health Partners was created in January 1997 as the parent company for the partnership between four distinguished voluntary hospitals: Beth Israel Medical Center-Milton and Carroll Petrie Division, Beth Israel Brooklyn, St. Luke’s Hospital and Roosevelt Hospital.

TranspareNYC Seeks Community Panelists

Do you want to get involved in the NYC budget process? TranspareNYC is looking for community panelists to help decide where $1 million in community grants will go. Last year, $907,798 was awarded to 167 organizations, including 36 new programs. The Manhattan Borough President’s office is specifically looking for people who display knowledge in Senior Services, Education, Urban Health Initiatives, Re-entry and Correctional Systems, and Parks and Recreation. Those interested can visit TranspareNYC.org, and the recruitment drive for prospective panelists ends on March 29th. Questions about the program can be directed to Linda Felstein at (212) 669-4814 or LFelstein@manhattanbp.org.

NextAct Spring Events

NextAct has scheduled two lectures on film for this spring. The first is on Thursday, March 14th, and is on Politics and the Movies by film critic Bilge Iberi. The second is on Thursday, April 18th, and is on The Life and Times of Alfred Hitchcock by film historian Max Alvarez. Both events will take place from 6 – 7:30 p.m. at the UJA-Federation of New York. The cost is $20 in advance, $25 at the door. For information and registration, contact Sarah Tornay at 212-273-5304 or stornay@jasa.org.

Success of the WSSA Food Bag Program

The Westside Senior Supported Agriculture Food Bag Program launched on August 23, 2012, and has been deemed a success. The main goal behind the program was to make it easier and cheaper for seniors to attain fresh produce, as it can become difficult for them to walk to their local farmers markets. The program matched local farmers with local seniors through GrowNYC, and provided a bag of fresh local produce bi-weekly for just 8 dollars. The first season ended last November, but a season two is already being planned for this fall, with hopes to expand to other neighborhoods besides the Upper West Side.

Makeover for UWS Dog Run

The Bull Moose Dog Run, located inside of the Theodore Roosevelt Park, is in talks of a makeover with a very high price tag, DNAinfo.com reports. The half a million-dollar upgrade would bring new turf, fencing, lighting, sound barriers, and a water playground. The most expensive aspect of the proposal is K9Grass, which would simplify waste pick-up and bring comfort to dog paws, at a cost of $250,000. Based on the opinions of the members of Community Board 7, the majority of the cost is going to need to be covered by private.

MOUNT SINAI AND CONTINUUM HEALTH PARTNERS TO MERGE

The Board of Trustees from The Mount Sinai Medical Center and Continuum Health Partners voted to approve a memorandum of understanding for a possible merger. The MOU outlines steps toward creating a new integrated health care system that combines operations of two entities.

“Our goal as an integrated health care system is to provide exceptional medical care to New Yorkers,” said Kenneth L. Davis, MD, President and Chief Executive Officer of The Mount Sinai Medical Center. “The combination will create more economies of scale, increase efficiencies, and expand access to advanced primary and specialty care throughout this citywide network.”

Stanley Brezenoff, President and Chief Executive Officer of Continuum, said, “This collaboration makes available an extraordinary range of resources for the provision of compassionate, state-of-the-art care for patients. In joining with Mount Sinai, we will further enhance our ability to provide the full spectrum of outstanding care to the populations we serve.”

Dr. John Andrilli Consults with Denis Tejada, RN

by David Gibbons

For many observers, the closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital—one of the oldest community hospitals in the nation and a New York City icon throughout the 20th century—was a disaster, a disgrace, a moral failure, an avoidable tragedy. After its demise at the end of April 2010, professionals in other downtown medical centers noted a surge in ER visits and ambulance runs. Now, just over two years later, the question is: Have the others been able to fill the gap?
The two major area players are Beth Israel Medical Center, part of Continuum Health Partners (CHP), and the North Shore-LIJ Health System. Beth Israel had already doubled the size of its emergency room after the closing of Cabrini Medical Center in 2008, so it was well prepared for the St. Vincent’s surge; other local hospitals also expanded and adapted to pick up the slack. Meanwhile, both CHP and North Shore-LIJ, as well as several independent partnerships of doctors, have begun to offer more options for urgent care.
In March, 2011, North Shore-LIJ partnered with VillageCare to open an urgent care center at 121A W. 20th St. Around the same time, North Shore-LIJ announced its trump card; plan to convert the O’Toole Building—the white wedding cake-like landmark on 7th Avenue between 12th and 13th streets that was part of the St. Vincent’s complex—into “the first stand-alone emergency and ambulatory facility in the New York City metropolitan area.”
“We developed what we felt was a realistic proposal to restore comprehensive health care to the West Side,” said Terry Lynam, a North Shore-LIJ spokesperson. “We’re investing $110 million to build a true community resource that will go a long way toward giving people access to health care that has been lacking since the closing of St. Vincent’s.” It is scheduled to open as The Lenox Hill Hospital Center for Comprehensive Care in early 2014.
“North Shore is doing a commendable job trying to rebuild some services,” said Dr. Fred Hyde, clinical professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and an expert on management and policy. “Still, the closing of a hospital is irrelevant to the utility of urgent care centers, since hospitals were never much good at outpatient care in the first place. Urgent care is a substitute for available primary care physicians, of which we may have too few—local, state and national.”
Hyde estimates that an individual physician, depending on how “muscular” a schedule he or she is willing to tackle, can serve a primary care base of
2,000 to 2,500 patients. These figures, together with a projection from the Urgent Care Association of America of one clinic per every 40- to 50,000 people, suggest that roughly 50 hardworking doctors staffing urgent care clinics in an area the size of southern Manhattan
could have a significant impact.
“If St. Vincent’s was like a lot of hospitals, it had an ER half-full of non-emergency patients who could have been treated in an urgent care clinic,” said Lou Ellen Horwitz, the Urgent Care Association’s executive director. “So while urgent care can’t replace hospital beds, it can create access for a lot of patients who would have gone to an ER.”
CHP’s strategy is to build neighborhood primary and specialty care practices that accept walk-ins, one of the many ways it strives to meet the needs
of the community, according to spokesman Jim Mandler. Marked by their familiar awnings with the blue Beth Israel logo, they are currently located in the West Village (222 W. 14th St.), Chelsea (202 W. 23rd St.) and lower Midtown (55 E. 34th St.).
The Chelsea practice is expanding and will relocate to the northwest corner of 23rd Street and 8th Avenue on Sept. 1 with 12,000 square feet of space on two floors.
Tom Poole, vice president of Continuum Medical Groups, who oversees development and operation of CHP’s community medical centers around
Manhattan, calls it “our newly renovated state-of-the art facility for walk-in primary and specialty care, one-stop shopping sorely needed to serve Chelsea and Penn South,” a neighborhood development with a large elderly population.
In November, Continuum will open another new Beth Israel facility on 8th Street in the West Village, able to handle 36,000 patient visits per year at full capacity.
“Our model for the future is easy, open access,” said Poole. “We’ve found this is what patients increasingly expect; they don’t want to wait six weeks to see their doctor. We aim to treat patients who need immediate or urgent care and create an environment that provides a satisfactory experience for everybody. To put it simply: We want happy patients, happy physicians and happy staff.”
“We’re able to see this with our practice on 14th Street, and we hope it will continue with the new locations on 23rd and 8th streets,” Mandler added. Poole says he feels a year from now will be a good time to re-evaluate the success of this new model; he also expects the increasing demand for urgent care to grow hand in hand with new housing development along the West Side.
(For more information on Beth Israel’s practices, visit www.bethisraelmedicalgroup.com or www.wehealny.org.)
At CityMD (www.citymd.net), they are equally bullish: “From our perspective, we see a major need for quality urgent care throughout the city and
particularly in the downtown area,” said COO Dr. Nedal Shami, adding that business is good. The company opened its new Flatiron branch at 37 W. 23rd St. on May 8 of this year, has another scheduled to open on 67th Street in the fall and is actively seeking a location in Tribeca or the Financial District for the near future.
Other private partnership practices along the lines of Beth Israel’s primary care walk-ins are opening up, among them the One Medical Group (www.
onemedical.com), which has five locations, including in the West Village, at 408 W. 14th St., and the Wall Street area, at 30 Broad St.
Additional urgent care options in Manhattan’s Lower West Side include New York Doctors Urgent Care, 65 W. 13th St.; Emergency Medical Care, 200 Chambers St. (www.emcny.com), and Medhattan Immediate Medical Care, 106 Liberty St. (www.medhattan.com).
According to rules of thumb and guesstimates from several experts, it appears that southern Manhattan’s urgent care needs are being addressed, and that the closing of St. Vincent’s, in the cold light of history, may one day be considered more of a transition than a
debacle.