by
Sean Ruck, Contributing Editor | September 02, 2019
From the September 2019 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
HCB News: Can you tell us roughly what the makeup of your patients is from a payor perspective?
AG: About 85 percent of the patients that receive care at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s are insured by the government, either through Medicaid or Medicare. Any hospital that has that ratio of government to commercial payors is going to have challenges. Part of our strategy is to develop and grow programs that can diversify our payor mix. Certain services have diversified quite nicely. Our bariatric surgery, as an example, has seen our payor mix change significantly from an overwhelmingly government payor mix to one that is balanced. It’s a small part of our business, but important. We have to identify other services that can help us diversify the types of patients and payors that come here. It’s challenging, but important work.
HCB News: Our interview is taking place in June, which was designated as Pride month a decade ago. I saw on the Mount Sinai website in the “about us” a section dedicated to LGBT Health. The section is extensive and also shows LGBT champions dating back to 2015. Were there any challenges to being able to position Mount Sinai as an LGBT advocate?
AG: That’s an interesting question. I will tell you that the Mount Sinai Health System is fully committed to LGBTQ care and to advocacy on behalf of LGBTQ patients. That ranges from specific programs we offer — one of our hospitals is a center for excellence for transgender surgery — to the approach we take with respect to patients who arrive at our hospitals. There’s training we do systemwide with our frontline staff regarding pronoun usage, respecting the desires of our patients regarding how they identify themselves and how they want to be identified by their caregivers. I think that’s part and parcel to the value Mount Sinai places on patients and employees.
Screens in the new Daily Management and Incident Command Center display real-time data for areas throughout the hospital, enabling staff to track patients during their stay and monitor flow, admissions, discharges, and other clinical operations.
It’s also part and parcel to the history of our hospitals. Mount Sinai was founded in 1852 for people who were Jewish at a time when the Jewish residents of New York couldn’t get care at certain hospitals. So there’s a long history of Mount Sinai identifying with and seeking to support people who have been historically oppressed or discriminated against. That’s also another reason I’m really proud to be part of this system.
