Mount Sinai Hospital (New York)

Creation of The Jews' Hospital

At the time of the founding of the hospital in 1852, other hospitals in New York City discriminated against Jewish people by not hiring Jewish doctors or nurses and by prohibiting Jewish patients from being treated in the hospitals' wards.^[13] Jewish doctors themselves faced restrictive quotas or outright refusal when it came to medical education and training in specialties.^[14] Orthodox Jewish philanthropist Sampson Simson worked with eight other Jewish benefactors to found the hospital in order to address the needs of New York's rapidly growing Jewish immigrant community, needs which included communicating with immigrants in the German language, the availability of kosher foods, and the understanding of Jewish burial customs.^[15]

Originally called The Jews' Hospital in the City of New York, it was the second Jewish hospital in the United States, after the Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati, Ohio, which was established in 1847.^[16] It was built on West 28th Street in Manhattan, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, on rural land donated by Simson, with the cornerstone being laid on November 25, 1852.^[17] It opened with 45 beds on May 17, 1855, two years before Simson's death.^[14] The cost of the new structure was $30,000 (equivalent to $1,037,000 in 2025).^[15] In 1856, its first full year of operation, the new entity saw a total of 216 admissions, with five surgeons and physicians on staff and six more that had consulting positions.^[18]

The hospital accepted only Jewish patients on a regular basis but was open to non-Jews for emergency cases.^[14] Most of these patients were poor and could not pay for any care,^[14] and by taking them in it relieved the burden on non-Jewish services to care for them and thus helped in relations between Jews and the larger community.^[10]

Civil War

Four years later, it was unexpectedly filled to capacity with soldiers injured in the American Civil War.^[19]

The Jews' Hospital felt the effects of the escalating Civil War in other ways, as staff doctors and board members were called into service. Dr. Israel Moses served four years as lieutenant colonel in the 72nd New York Infantry Regiment;^[20] Joseph Seligman had to resign as a member of the board of directors, as he was increasingly called upon by President Lincoln for advice on the country's growing financial crisis.^[21][22]

The New York Draft Riots of 1863 also impacted the hospital's resources, as it admitted many of the wounded.^[14]

Change to The Mount Sinai Hospital

More and more, the Jews' Hospital was finding itself an integral part of the general community, and the experiences during the Civil War convinced the hospital to adopt a more secular outlook.^[15] In 1866, to reflect this new-found role, it changed its name to Mount Sinai Hospital.^[23] This again helped in community relations, as by accepting everyone as patients it helped undermine the stereotype that Jews only cared about taking care of their own people.^[10] Becoming non-sectarian also qualified the hospital to receive public fundings.^[5]

But despite becoming non-sectarian, Mount Sinai would clearly be for many years a Jewish hospital, in that it was supported by Jewish benefactors from New York, one of its main goals was to treat poor Jewish patients, it provided training for Jewish interns and residents, and it provided long-term hospital privileges for Jewish physicians.^[24]

Move to the East Side

Seeking more space,^[25] the hospital then moved uptown to the east side of Lexington Avenue between East 66th and 67th streets.^[26] The cornerstone ceremony at the new location took place on May 25, 1870, with some 1,500 people in attendance and speeches delivered by Mayor A. Oakey Hall and Judge Albert Cardozo.^[17] The dedication for the opening of the buildings took place on May 29, 1872, with an address given by Governor John T. Hoffman.^[27] The cost of the new facility was $340,000 (equivalent to $9,138,000 in 2025).^[27] Capacity was thrice that of before,^[19] although for a while the new location had a synagogue but lacked an operating room.^[5]

With the larger space, the hospital was able to expand the specialties it handled, including dermatology, eye and ear issues, neurology, and pediatrics, as well as offering outpatient services.^[19] The hospital would concentrate on free care for patients throughout the rest of the 19th century.^[5]

Move to the Upper East Side

The Mount Sinai Hospital forged relationships with many physicians who made contributions to medicine, including Henry N. Heineman, Frederick S. Mandelbaum, Bernard Sachs, Charles A. Elsberg, Emanuel Libman, and, most significantly, Abraham Jacobi, known as the father of American pediatrics^[6] and a champion of the move to the hospital's new site on Manhattan's Upper East Side at the beginning of the century. The motivation for changing locations was to obtain more space to accommodate the greater number of people seeking hospital services;^[19] an advantage of the new site was the reduction in the amount of nearby urban commotion by virtue of one side of the site being alongside Central Park.^[25]

Building at the new location began in 1901.^[18] In particular, on May 22, 1901, the cornerstone ceremony for construction at the new location was held on Fifth Avenue and 100th Street.^[28] Temporary viewing stands were erected,^[29] and several thousand people were in attendance.^[30] Speeches were given by dignitaries such as Randolph Guggenheimer and Seth Low.^[28] A common theme was that while the history of the hospital reflected the ideals of Judaism, it would continue benefit all people of any religion or race.^[30][28]

The new location was officially opened and dedicated on March 15, 1904,^[31] with a speech given by Governor Benjamin Odell.^[32] The hospital consisted of ten buildings, which together took up the whole block between 100th and 101st Streets and Fifth and Madison Avenues.^[33] There were corridors connecting the structures,^[33] as from the beginning, having underground passages that would link the buildings had been part of the plan.^[29] There were 456 patient beds altogether,^[18] spread across the five of the buildings that were patient pavilions.^[32] The other buildings were for administrative, maintenance, laboratory, and other support functions.^[33] The buildings were constructed of brick and limestone.^[32] As at the prior location, a synagogue was included in the administrative building.^[33] The new facility was said to be the largest hospital in the United States in size and the third largest in terms of patient capacity.^[31] The total cost of the new location was upwards of $3 million (equivalent to $107 million in 2025),^[32] most of which came from Jewish benefactors.^[31]

In 1903, S. S. Goldwater, a doctor, was appointed superintendent of the hospital,^[34] and as such became the first professional medical hospital administrator anywhere in the United States.^[14] He served in that role until 1916, after which he served as a director of the hospital until 1926.^[34]

Staff at Mount Sinai saw that social problems were often linked to medical ones,^[14] and in 1906, the first social worker was hired.^[35] A social service department was created under Goldwater's leadership,^[14] which would subsequently become known as the Department of Social Work Services.^[19] A decade later it had a staff of eighteen and a decade after that forty, growing to become one of the largest social service departments in any hospital in the nation – with a role that was especially important during traumatic periods such as the Great Depression.^[35]

The early 20th century saw the population of New York City explode. That, coupled with many new discoveries at Mount Sinai (including significant advances in blood transfusions and the first endotracheal anesthesia apparatus), meant that Mount Sinai's pool of doctors and specialists was in increasing demand.

World War I

The hospital soon envisioned a building program along the south side of 100th Street in order to expand further,^[36] and then a goal of reaching down to 99th Street based upon a plan adopted in 1913.^[37] A $1.35 million ($48,400,000 in current dollar terms) expansion of the 1904 hospital site^[37] raced to keep pace with demand. The opening of the new buildings was delayed by the advent of World War I.

Mount Sinai responded to a request from the United States Army Medical Corps with the creation of Base Hospital No.3. This unit went to France in early 1918, and treated 9,127 patients with 172 deaths: 54 surgical and 118 medical, the latter due mainly to influenza and pneumonia.

Totaling seven new structures, the last three of the 1913 building program were not completed until 1922, construction having been delayed not just by the war but also by the era's accompanying high prices.^[38]

A focus on research

From the early years of the 20th century on, doing medical research became an active priority at Mount Sinai.^[14] At first, findings from research activities were published as part of the biennial Mount Sinai Hospital Reports series. In 1925, the hospital established a long-term research endowment fund and a medical journal in which to publish research results,^[24] as well as postgraduate teaching programs emphasizing both general care and various specialty areas.^[18] Subsequently, the Mount Sinai Journal of Medicine was founded in 1934 and would publish as a general medical journal until 2007.^[39] The demographics of the East Harlem neighborhood around two sides of Mount Sinai started changing in the 1920s, with a large influx of Puerto Ricans coming in; the hospital provided ward medical service to them.^[24]

For many years, the staff at Mount Sinai was disproportionately Jewish, in part due to many Christian-run hospitals being reluctant to hire those doctors.^[5] Not only were Jewish quotas in effect for medical schools, but hiring into internship and residency programs was even more difficult, as was getting admitting privileges at hospitals.^[24] This was especially the case in the period after World War I, when antisemitism ran high in the United States.^[10] It was these barriers that made the existence of Jewish hospitals so important, and of all the Jewish hospitals in the United States, The Mount Sinai Hospital was the most preeminent in clinical and research terms and as such attracted the brightest Jewish medical school graduates from around the country.^[24] Nonetheless, staff positions at Mount Sinai were filled via a highly competitive process designed to be impartial, and substantial numbers of non-Jews were hired as well.^[24]

World War II

With tensions in Europe escalating, a committee dedicated to finding placements for doctors fleeing Nazi Germany was founded in 1933. With the help of the National Committee for the Resettlement of Foreign Physicians, Mount Sinai Hospital became a new home for a large number of émigrés. When World War II broke out, Mount Sinai was the first hospital to throw open its doors to Red Cross nurses' aides; the hospital trained many in its effort to reduce the nursing shortage in the United States. Meanwhile, the president of the medical board, George Baehr, M.D., was called by President Roosevelt to serve as the nation's chief medical director of the Office of Civilian Defense.^[40]

These wartime roles were eclipsed, however, when the men and women of Mount Sinai's 3rd General Hospital set sail for Casablanca, Morocco, eventually setting up a 1,000-bed hospital in war-torn Tunisia. Before moving to tend to the needs of soldiers in Italy and France, the 3rd General Hospital had treated more than 5,000 wounded soldiers.^[41]

Postwar

The year 1952 saw the opening of three buildings along the 99th Street portion of the campus: the Klingenstein Pavilion, which housed the maternity pavilion, the Berg Laboratory, and the Atran Laboratory.^[25]

In 1962, the Kingenstein Clinical Center was opened, which included a large psychiatric unit with 137 beds.^[42] Taking up the full block between 99th and 100th Streets, it became the most prominent Mount Sinai building along the Madison Avenue side.^[43]

In 1949, 100th Street stopped being a thoroughfare between Madison and Fifth Avenues as the city gave the rights to it to Mount Sinai, which used it for parking for a while until it vanished under 1980s era renovation work. The similar block of 99th Street was deeded from the city to Mount Sinai in 1958, becoming the Hospital Gardens for a while before the advent of the Annenberg Building.^[36]

Creation of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine

After World War II, the levels of antisemitism in the medical profession gradually declined,^[10] and after a while Mount Sinai no longer had a large advantage in being able to hire the best Jewish physicians.^[5] This posed a particular threat to Mount Sinai, with its lack of an affiliated medical school to interest academically and scientifically oriented Jewish physicians.^[24] In addition, the kind of medical research that Mount Sinai physicians had long excelled at, based on observations of patients in the clinical wards combined with use of the hospital's laboratory facilities, was being overtaken by more sophisticated analyses with roots in the latest biomedical science.^[24]

The solution to both these trends was seen to be the creation of an affiliated medical school, even though that being done by a hospital rather a university was quite unusual.^[24] Thus in 1963, the hospital created a medical school, and in 1968, it welcomed the first students of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.^[19]

The initial site for the school was a converted and renovated bus garage that previously kept in store the city's Fifth and Madison Avenues buses.^[44] Located at 10 East 102nd Street, Mount Sinai paid $7 million (equivalent to $65 million in 2025) for the facility,^[45] which would subsequently become known as the Cummings Basic Sciences Building.^[43][46] But the plan was already underway to construct the large new building to house the school on a permanent basis,^[44] and for which construction began in 1970.^[47] The Mount Sinai School of Medicine became the seventh medical school within New York City.^[44]

Advent of The Mount Sinai Medical Center

That new structure was the Annenberg Building, a voluminous, 437-foot (133 m) tall rust-colored steel structure at Fifth Avenue and 100th Street.^[47] It was said to be the largest medical school structure in the world at the time.^[45] The dedication for the building was given in 1974 by Vice President Gerald Ford, whose remarks discussed various ideas for improving the availability of health insurance coverage in the United States.^[47] More than half of the new building was occupied by the medical school, with the balance allocated to various forms of advanced medical analysis and treatment.^[47] Designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the building was much larger than its immediate neighbors and, in the words of architecture critic Paul Goldberger, "dominates—no, destroys is more the word—the skyline" over the northern portion of Central Park.^[48] The building cost $117 million (equivalent to $764 million in 2025); following substantial contributions by the businessman and diplomat Walter Annenberg and his siblings, it was named for their mother, with some funds also coming from other private donations as well as from federal and state sources.^[47] Years after its opening, the Annenberg Building would still be viewed as controversial in its appearance and effect upon the skyline.^[49][50]

In 1965, Mount Sinai became the first hospital in the United States to install an IBM System/360 computer, seeking to expand the capacity and speed of its data processing operations.^[51] Indeed, it was said to be the first hospital in the world to do so, and the first of any type of organization within New York City.^[52] It was used for storing, retrieving, and processing administrative data as well as for scientific applications.^[53] A promotional photograph showed two men in suits over a computer terminal while three nurses in the white uniforms and caps of the time looked on.^[54] Once the Mount Sinai School of Medicine was in existence, it tended to have its own computer systems. The Laboratory of Computer Science was in existence within the school,^[52] having been created during the early 1970s.^[55] It used DEC PDP-11 minicomputers.^[55] It featured access using early video display terminals for some medical personnel,^[52] while others accessed it via Teletype Model 33 machines.^[55]

In contrast, for administrative applications, the Mount Sinai Hospital, and the Mount Sinai Medical Center as a whole, remained an IBM mainframe shop.^[56] The mid-to-late 1970s saw the first online applications appear at Mount Sinai, running at IBM 3270 terminals under control of CICS: these included admissions-discharges-transfers, outpatient visit recording, and some medical records, but in this era most applications were still run via batch processing from manually submitted forms, so for instance while the pharmacy profile system was online, the drugs and stores inventory was batch.^[57] Indeed, the Mount Sinai data processing department was profiled in Computerworld newspaper in 1980 as having been an early adopter, and still heavy user, of computer output microfiche, including via the Kodak Komstar, with some 188,000 frames of reports being produced per month for applications such as patient history, inpatient census, inpatient billing, outpatient records, personnel, and payroll.^[58]

The hospital had opened a medical library in 1883,^[14] and within a couple of years it had around 10,000 volumes.^[59] In 1910, the library had been renamed the Abraham Jacobi Library to honor of one Mount Sinai's most significant figures.^[18] The field of medical librarianship became established in the 1940s, led by courses at the Columbia University School of Library Service,^[18] and the hospital hired its first full-time, professional librarian in 1946.^[59] The library continued to grow,^[18] and by the 1960s had eight librarians and two dozen either full- or part-time staff members working there.^[59] With the creation of the medical school and the opening of the Annenberg Building, the Gustave L. and Janet W. Levy Library was created in 1974.^[59] Libraries sometimes existed elsewhere in the hospital as well, such as a professionally run one in the data processing department for documentation and other process functions.^[57] The Levy Library began a years-long course of improving its computer technology services, especially regarding the provision of computer-assisted instruction and associated study areas and the availability of resources from across the Internet and various research databases.^[59]

The upper bound of the campus has long been found on the northern side of East 102nd Street.^[43][60] This is an eight-story building at 5 East 102nd that was used both as office space and a parking garage;^[46] a couple of the floors of the building were occupied by Mount Sinai's electronic data processing and accounting and finance departments. In contrast, the eighth floor was occupied by a drug treatment facility run by New York Medical College.^[61] In the late 2000s the building underwent a substantial renovation,^[46] becoming the Center for Advanced Medicine. Opening in 2008 with the expanded address of 5–17 East 102nd Street, it houses various Mount Sinai medical functions including outpatient services.^[62][63]

During the 1980 New York City transit strike, Mount Sinai avoided any interruption to its patient care by arranging various ways for employees to get to or stay at the facility, including expanded bicycle racks, overnight cots, and a dozen specially chartered bus routes from sites in the different boroughs to the hospital.^[64]

By the early 1980s, Mount Sinai's hospital contained 1,200 beds and its medical school graduated 100 doctors a year and its budget was almost $300 million.^[65] But the hospital was dealing with an aging physical plant, as several from the original 1904 opening were still in active use.^[65] Overall, the Mount Sinai campus was an "architectural hodgepodge", in the words of the New York Times: there were 21 buildings in all, including some ornamented red-brick buildings, white-brick structures, service buildings, and various other structures.^[49] They acted as pavilions, clinical centers, labs, halls, annexes, and other facilities.^[43] Most of buildings were connected via a heavily trafficked underground passageway,^[49] known as the B-1 Level.^[43] Many kinds of traffic went through these corridors: patients being transported, food carts being wheeled, staff going to meetings, visitors, security guards, all mixed together.^[49]

Redevelopment of campus

Accordingly, in the early 1980s, Mount Sinai began a large-scale redevelopment of its campus under the aegis of the architect I. M. Pei, the first medical facility designed by him,^[49] and began a public fundraising drive to raise the monies necessary to make it possible.^[65] The New York Times characterized Pei's renovation proposal as "one of the most extensive and innovation plans ever proposed by a major hospital in the country."^[66]

At first there were delays in gaining approval from New York State for this and other major expansion and renovation plans for hospitals within New York City.^[66] The decade of the 1980s also saw large-scale changes in how hospital funding was done due the adoption by the U.S. government of diagnosis-related groups (DRG) in connection with Medicare reimbursements as a result of a 1982 change in federal law and regulation; as a result, Mount Sinai began to focus more on marketing and the management of patient throughput.^[24] But construction on the Mount Sinai project began in 1986.^[50]

Eleven buildings and structures between 100th and 101st Streets were demolished as part of the work,^[50] to make way for the new Pei-designed Guggenheim Pavilion, a 1,000,000 square feet (93,000 m²) structure that was dedicated in 1992.^[67] The new facility, which was architecturally coordinated by the firms Pei Cobb Freed & Partners in conjunction with Ellerbe Associates,^[50][68] featured a pair of large, naturally lit atriums and a goal of relieving some of the stress of the patient experience.^[68] The effort also involved the renovation of three other pavilions engaged in patient care.^[67] The Guggenheim Pavilion itself cost $200 million (equivalent to $459 million in 2025,^[68] while the overall cost of the entire redevelopment project was $500 million (equivalent to $1,147 million in 2025.^[67] Architecture critic Herbert Muschamp gave extensive praise to Pei's work on the Guggenheim Pavilion, calling it "lucid in organization, lustrous in space",^[68] while an assessment in Architecture: The AIA Journal called it "an urban project that performs well both within Mount Sinai's sprawling complex and within Manhattan's Upper East Side."^[50]

On the other side of Madison Avenue between 98th and 99th Streets was parking space run the by medical center;^[43] this was subsequently replaced by the Icahn Medical Institute structure,^[60] which opened in the late 1990s.

By the end of the 20th century, Mount Sinai was seeing some 50,000 inpatient admissions and discharges per year, about 400,000 inpatient-days in total, along with around 300,000 outpatient visits a year.^[14]

Among the innovations at Mount Sinai were performing the first blood transplant into the vein of a fetus in 1986, and the development of a technique for inserting radioactive seeds into the prostate to treat cancer in 1995.^[69]

Failed merger, financial crisis and recovery

In 1998, Mount Sinai had entered into a merger agreement with New York University Medical Center.^[70] The initial goal was to merge both the two medical schools as well as the two hospitals, but the arrangement soon ran into trouble.^[71] Subsequently, the idea was to keep the medical schools separate but merge the hospitals.^[14] But beginning in 2001, the merger was in the process of falling through completely and the two entities began to separate whatever parts they had started to merge.^[71] This turn of events left Mount Sinai in a prolonged state of organizational indecisiveness.^[70]

Furthermore, the medical center was in a period of financial crisis;^[19] by 2002, it had a budget deficit of $100 million and was cutting staff and services.^[70] Nevertheless, the turnaround was successful and Mount Sinai survived the financial strain,^[19] soon reaching a stronger state than it had been in when the merger discussions first began.^[71]

Following a $200 million (equivalent to $280 million in 2025 donation from the financier Carl Icahn, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine was renamed to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in 2012.^[72]

Like some other major hospitals, Mount Sinai has an "amenities unit" that gives exclusive, pampering service for wealthy patients willing to pay extra for health care.^[73] Known as "Eleven West",^[74] It opened in the mid-1990s, was refurbished in the early 2010s, and brings the hospital several million dollars a year in revenue.^[73]

Two additional large buildings appeared during the early 2010s, as part of another major expansion.^[72] The Leon and Norma Hess Center for Science and Medicine, located on Madison Avenue between 101st and 102nd streets, opened in 2012 as a clinical and laboratory complex for research into such areas as cancer, heart disease, issues of the brain, the human genome, and advanced imaging.^[75][72] Also opening in 2012 was a 500-foot (150 m) tower on the south side of 102nd Street between Madison Avenue and Fifth Avenue, which has lower floors housing Mount Sinai facilities, while the upper floors are residential.^[76] The medical facilities part of the building has the address 10 E. 102nd Street.^[77] In contrast, the residential portion of the tower has a Fifth Avenue address, even though the building is not on that thoroughfare, due to a special consideration granted by the Manhattan Borough president's office after Mount Sinai indicated they needed the higher rents that a more prestigious address would bring in order to balance anticipated lower federal healthcare spending.^[72] Nonetheless, making use of the New York State Housing Finance Agency's 80/20 housing and 421-a tax exemption provisions, twenty percent of the residential units were set aside for low-income residents.^[77]

Advent of the Mount Sinai Health System

Later during the 2010s, there was a wave of consolidations within the health care industry, and Mount Sinai grew into the larger Mount Sinai Health System which featured seven hospitals overall and a network of outpatient facilities.^[72]

David L. Reich, president and COO of the hospital, announced in March 2020 that the hospital was converting Guggenheim Pavilion lobbies into extra patient rooms to "meet the growing volume of patients" that contracted COVID-19.^[78][79] As with other hospitals in the city, the nurses and other medical staff of Mount Sinai were soon celebrated as heroes during the dark initial period of the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City.^[80]

Efforts at Mount Sinai regarding realizing some of the goals that would later become known as diversity, equity, and inclusion began in 2000 and were renewed in 2016.^[81] They then gained special emphasis with the creation of a Task Force to Address Racism in 2020 in reaction to the murder of George Floyd.^[81]

In August 2024, Moody's Investor Service downgraded Mount Sinai Hospital and Icahn School of Medicine to its lowest investment grade, Baa3. Moody's cited $1.8 billion in debt by the end of 2023, initial delays in closing the merged but struggling Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and cash flow damages due to a cyber-attack in February 2024 at Mount Sinai’s payment system, Change Healthcare.^[82]

In early 2026, there was a strike by nurses of the New York State Nurses Association against both the main campus of The Mount Sinai Hospital as well as two other hospitals within the Mount Sinai Health System.^[83] The strike, which lasted a month before being settled, caused serious disruptions, with elective surgeries not taking place and patients sometimes being moved to uninvolved hospitals; Mount Sinai spent many millions of dollars hiring temporary replacement nurses during the work outage.^[80] The labor action was over not just pay rates but demands by the nurses for increased minimum staffing levels at the hospitals, for better protections against violent patients, and for safeguards against certain uses of artificial intelligence.^[80][83]

Milestones

2000s

• At Mount Sinai the staff performed the first successful composite tracheal transplant, which was performed at the hospital in 2005.
• First gene variant linked to autism identified.^[84]  
• Zahi Fayad, PhD, and Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, develop a technique called “black blood MRI” to detect vulnerable arterial plaque.^[85]
• Published the first medical publication along with Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, antiretroviral treatments for HIV+ patients with renal failure.^[86]  
• Bruce Gelb, MD, with collaborators, co-discovers that mutations in PTPN11 cause Noonan syndrome, inaugurating the Ras/MAPK “RASopathies” disease family.^[87]
• Fabrazyme approved by FDA to treat Fabry disease, developed by Robert Desnick, PhD, MD, David Bishop, PhD, and Yiannis Ioannou, PhD.^[88]
• First successful composite tracheal transplant is performed by Eric Genden, MD, using tissue from a donor and the recipient.^[89]  
• 1918 flu virus reconstructed by Adolfo García-Sastre, Peter Palese and colleagues for modern research.^[90]  
• OLIG2 gene linked to schizophrenia is discovered.^[91]
• Proteins associated with ALS are identified in cerebrospinal fluid.^[92]
• Advanced imaging of leukocyte microdomains (white blood cell movement) developed.^[93]
• Standard definitions for bleeding in trials established by Roxana Mehran, MD.^[94]  

2010s

• In January 2013 David L. Reich was the first openly gay medical doctor named interim president of Mount Sinai Hospital as reported by The New York Times.^[95] In October of the same year he was named president.^[96][97]
• Mechanism for a Parkinson’s gene mutation uncovered.^[98]
• Vivek Reddy, MD implanted the first U.S. leadless cardiac pacemaker (St. Jude/Abbott Nanostim), launching the LEADLESS II pivotal trial.^[99]
• First U.S. use of an FDA-approved drug-coated balloon for leg arteries.^[100]
• Saadi Ghatan, MD, and team implant the NeuroPace RNS® system in a 14-year-old—then the youngest patient treated with this device—helping establish pediatric use of RNS for drug-resistant epilepsy.^[101]
• May, 20215 Kidney Stone Center opens for advanced and preventive care.
• First HIV-positive–to–HIV-positive organ transplant in New York State, performed by Sander Florman, MD, and Susan Lerner, MD.^[102]
• First tau-PET pattern of CTE reported in a living person. reavealing a CTE-typical tau pattern in a former NFL player—an early step toward in-life detection of the disease.^[103]
• Immune map of eczema by Emma Guttman, MD, PhD, and colleagues guides a breakthrough therapy.^[104]
• Two strains of human herpesvirus are found in the brains of people with Alzheimer’s disease at levels up to twice as high as in those without Alzheimer’s, as shown by Joel Dudley, PhD, and Samuel Gandy, MD, PhD.^[105]

2020s

• Florian Krammer, PhD, and Viviana Simon, MD, PhD, lead a team that develops, validates, and launches a test that detects the quantity as well as the presence or absence of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2.^[106]
• Common prostate cancer gene fusion identified, transforming diagnosis and research into disease subtypes.^[107]
• Gustave L. Levy Stroke Unit earns certification as Comprehensive Stroke Center.^[108]
• Mount Sinai doctors performed the first liver transplant in the US for a patient with acute intermittent porphyria.^[109]
• Institute for Health Equity Research established.^[110]

Recent acknowledgments

Controversies

• Dr. Jack M. Gorman, formerly Department Chairman of Psychiatry at Mount Sinai, engaged in a long-term inappropriate sexual relationship with a patient prior to October 2005.^[127]
• In August 2016, Dennis S. Charney, then dean of the medical school, was shot and wounded as he left a deli in his home town of Chappaqua, New York. Hengjun Chao, a former Mount Sinai medical researcher who had been fired by Charney for research misconduct in 2010, was convicted of attempted second degree murder and two other charges in 2017, and received a sentence of 28 years.^{[128][129][130][131]}
• In 2017, Dr. David H. Newman, a former emergency room physician at Mount Sinai Hospital, was sentenced to two years in prison for sexually abusing four female patients in the emergency room between 2015 and 2016, including touching their breasts.^[132][133]
• Three doctors were convicted of violating anti-kickback laws by accepting bribes disguised as speaker fees to write prescriptions to a highly addictive fentanyl opioid painkiller. Gordon Freedman, an anesthesiologist at Mount Sinai, was convicted in December 2019 in Manhattan federal court.^{[134][135][136]} Alexandru Burducea, a pain management doctor and anesthesiologist who previously worked at Mount Sinai, was sentenced in January 2020 to 57 months in prison.^{[134][135][136]} Dialecti Voudouris, who specialized in oncology and hematology at Lenox Hill Hospital and Mount Sinai, was sentenced in 2020 to time served.^[137][138]
• In April 2019, a lawsuit was filed against Mount Sinai Health System and several employees of the hospital and the Icahn School's Arnhold Institute for Global Health.^[139] The suit was filed by eight current and former doctors and employees for alleged age and sex discrimination and based on a list of other allegations.^[140] The school denied the claims.^[139]