NEW YORK-Medical schools are delving into the anatomy of mergers.
After bilateral talks between all four academic medical centers on Manhattan Island-the nation’s greatest concentration of medical education-NYU and Mount Sinai have forged a marriage of convenience.
With managed care suddenly growing here at an astonishing rate, the medical centers and their schools, though financially stable today, believe their long-term prosperity may depend on two living more cheaply than one.
Details of the prenuptial agreement are scanty, but the school will be known as NYU-Mount Sinai and the medical center as Mount Sinai-NYU.
Three miles from one another on the IRT subway, plus a brisk walk on either end, NYU and Mount Sinai will form a medical school of more than 1,600 students and 3,600 faculty members. The new center becomes New York’s largest, with 2,260 beds and annual revenues of nearly $1.4 billion-but only 12% of Manhattan’s market and 6% of the city’s.
With economies of scale anticipated from the merger, the colossus presents a direct challenge to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center and New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center, the other two academic medical centers on the island. At times a merger between the two has been near, but Cornell has been reluctant. Also vulnerable to managed care is Memorial Sloan-Kettering.
How the NYU-Sinai merger will affect the egos and ambitions of academics in corresponding clinical departments wasn’t clear. Attrition was murmured.
Meanwhile, two other ego-packed medical schools, Stanford and UCSF, are also talking merger. -Mark Bloom
NEW YORK-Medical schools are delving into the anatomy of mergers.
