On a wet afternoon in Might, the 96 members of New York College Grossman Faculty of Drugs, Class of 2025, gathered with their households in Carnegie Corridor. They crossed the stage, collected their levels, and all collectively recited the Hippocratic oath. However whereas their commencement into the ranks of medical docs was the purpose of the ceremony, in some methods it didn’t really feel just like the day’s principal occasion.
That belonged to a different pair on stage, Dr. Robert Grossman and Ken Langone—graduates of a special type, who as dean and board chairman respectively have been presiding for the 18th and final time over the commencement ceremony. This was their swan track, or possibly one thing extra of a victory lap.
Grossman spoke of his hard-fought path to the highest of NYU Langone—“I had no sponsors, no mentors, no coaches. Nobody was there to introduce me to any ‘necessary’ individuals or direct my profession”—earlier than imparting 15 nuggets of knowledge he had collected. (No. 1: “It doesn’t matter the place you come from, it does matter how excessive you intention.” No. 5: “Depth of information is essential.” No. 14: “Discover the fitting accomplice.”)
His enterprise accomplice, Langone, gave him a heat embrace and in his personal speech, remarked that his affiliation with Grossman was “probably the most rewarding of his life.”
The viewers was well-disposed to share the highlight: Due to Langone and Grossman, their medical educations had all come tuition-free. And Grossman’s classes have been on level—since they encapsulated the ambition and tenacity that made NYU Langone an enviable success story in American well being care.
20 years in the past, NYU’s educational medical heart was a troubled establishment, treading water; at present, it’s one of many nation’s best suppliers of high-quality care, with 53,000 workers, roughly $14 billion in income—up from $2 billion in 2007—and greater than 320 areas. Its improvements in medical-school training—introducing an accelerated three-year curriculum, and that free tuition—have made its applications fashions for others across the nation. NYU Langone has wooed world-leading expertise whereas scaling the ranks of federally funded analysis hospitals. And whereas it has taken place in a well being care setting, the NYU Langone restoration has been pushed by two interlinked elements—a disciplined reliance on information and a relentless tradition of accountability—that wouldn’t really feel misplaced on Wall Avenue or in Silicon Valley.
The turnaround is a supply of a lot delight for the considerably unlikely pair that presided over it: Grossman, a neuroradiologist who had no formal enterprise coaching when he turned CEO and dean of the medical heart in 2007; and Ken Langone, the billionaire co-founder of House Depot who has chaired its board—and given a lot money and time to the establishment that it now bears his title—since 1999. (Langone, who can be a significant Republican donor, later honored Grossman by naming NYU Langone’s two medical faculties after him.)
It’s a narrative the 2 males, 78 and 89 respectively, are keen to inform as they put together handy over their roles to rigorously chosen successors come September 1. NYU Langone granted Fortune entry to its executives and inside workings to raised perceive the group and its transformation. For a reporter who has written extensively in regards to the nation’s usually dysfunctional well being system, it was a possibility to be taught what it took for one American well being system to succeed—and what others can be taught from it.
It’s additionally a time when many hospitals need assistance—stat. In 2023, 48% of the nation’s rural hospitals operated at a monetary loss. A couple of-third of them—some 700—have been vulnerable to closure, based on a 2024 report by the Heart for Healthcare High quality and Fee Reform. And this yr’s cuts to Medicaid and Nationwide Institutes of Well being (NIH) funding have imposed severe turbulence on hospitals of all types.
NYU Langone has been blessed by geography—headquartered amid the concentrated wealth of midtown Manhattan—and supported, in time and beneficiant donations, by a board that reads just like the visitor checklist of a Davos cocktail social gathering. Past Langone, and to call only a few, trustees embody board co-Chair and BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Ken Chenault (former CEO of American Categorical), and former Goldman Sachs exec and Trump advisor Gary Cohn. Overseers embody JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, billionaire hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones, and David Zaslav, president and CEO of Warner Brothers.
NYU Langone is a non-profit well being system, however make no mistake, it’s run like the massive enterprise that it’s. (By 2024 revenues, it will rank No. 308 on this yr’s Fortune 500.) Grossman earned $22.8 million in whole compensation in 2023, and its docs rank amongst New York’s highest paid—as Tom Murphy, founder and accomplice at private-equity fund Crestview Companions and one other trustee, proudly identified to me, “We pay our individuals nicely to do a very good job.”
Many are uncomfortable with the notion of non-profit hospitals working extra like Fortune 500 firms than charity wards. However Ge Bai, a professor of accounting and well being coverage at Johns Hopkins, says, “That’s the fact these days.” She notes that NYU Langone has been uniquely profitable within the {industry} due to its strengths producing affected person income and controlling bills. “Their operations are wonderful,” Bai provides.
$14 billion
Approximate income for the NYU Langone well being system in 2024.
You could surprise if NYU Langone is profitable just because it’s charging extra. However an evaluation of Turquoise Well being information, displaying charges charged by New York’s 5 giant hospital methods for eight continuously carried out procedures discovered that NYU’s costs, on common, ranked second-lowest, behind Mount Sinai.
Certainly, the operations are the place the learnings are. And whereas it’s tempting to ask how transferrable classes from a rich, well-connected hospital system might be in different elements of the nation, NYU Langone lately has expanded into tougher markets—that’s, ones with poorer and sicker sufferers—producing proof that its turnaround playbook can work exterior of the rarified confines of Manhattan.
What then is NYU’s secret sauce, and the way can others replicate the components?
Inheriting a medical mess
Issues weren’t good when Grossman arrived at New York College Medical Heart to run the radiology division in 2001. He was days into the position when a pipe burst in his workplace, leaving a pile of plaster and unpleasant particles. It took eight weeks to get somebody from the group to repair it, as a result of nobody would take possession: Was the medical college accountable for the wall, or the hospital?
To Grossman, who had come from Penn, the absurd scenario symbolized the inefficiency and dysfunction that ailed NYUMC and educational drugs extra broadly. When he turned dean and CEO in 2007, Grossman vowed to run the college and hospital as a single built-in entity. He additionally boldly dedicated to make the establishment “world-class”—“an educational medical heart competing efficiently with the Hopkins, the Harvards and Penns,” he wrote in his investiture speech.
Langone, a self-made enterprise titan who, earlier than co-founding House Depot, had taken Digital Information Programs public with Ross Perot, shared Grossman’s lofty objectives. He had joined the board in 1999 when his buddy, Martin Lipton, an M&A legal professional and NYU trustee, informed Langone he wanted assist with a multitude on the medical heart. (A graduate of NYU’s enterprise college, Langone says he didn’t even notice NYU had a medical heart.)
That mess: a 1998 merger with Mount Sinai that had gone so badly that the hospitals broke up a number of years later. By 2003, the mixed entity had racked up three straight years of losses, $670 million in debt, and a junk-bond score. The establishment was unbiased once more, however not worthwhile, when Grossman obtained promoted in 2007.
Langone and Grossman had bonded a number of years earlier when Grossman, wanting to interchange his division’s radiology gear, had put out a request for proposals. Displaying some uncooked enterprise expertise, he negotiated an unthinkably good take care of Siemens: The medtech firm agreed to give NYU the expertise, plus $100 million for NYU to function a showroom. These phrases impressed Langone, who occurred to be on the board of Normal Electrical, a shedding bidder. That Langone didn’t let that battle—or his friendship with GE’s then-CEO Jack Welch—intrude with the Siemens deal, in the meantime, impressed Grossman.
Joe Kohen—WireImage/Getty Photographs
Over time, the 2 have change into extremely shut, buying and selling common cellphone calls and referring to one another as “brothers from completely different moms.” Grossman attributes their kinship to their hardscrabble childhoods and the resilience it fostered. He was a scholarship child who described his mother to me as “an unlawful immigrant.” Langone’s mother and father, additionally immigrants, labored as a plumber and a cafeteria employee, and didn’t get education past junior excessive.
Langone, 11 years Grossman’s senior, performs the gregarious and protecting older sibling within the relationship. After I met him at his Park Avenue workplace, he heaped reward on Grossman—“He’s sensible…values past reproach…this man might take my job doing offers!” (In terms of himself, Langone’s susceptible to absurd self-effacement: “I’m not the brightest bulb,” he tends to say, emphasizing his science training resulted in eighth grade.) The large-brother vibe performs out virtually too: Grossman, who described Langone as “the perfect man on the planet,” says he’s a keenly clever sounding board, and a few further muscle. “We take care of politicians, and he’s related, and that’s crucial as nicely.”
The board sees the duo’s dynamic as a key to NYU Langone’s success. Murphy describes Grossman because the transformation’s visionary, and Langone as its enabling drive. Fink, who factors out his agency owns 5%-10% of just about each main firm on the planet, says, “I see some actually good management and a few actually crappy management, nevertheless it was very clear, very early on that the chemistry between Bob and Ken was one thing very distinctive.” He provides, “Bob grew into the CEO position—loads of it was the belief he had with Ken, and possibly a bit of bit with me.”
Grossman’s management was a shock to the broader system, nonetheless. He fired a lot of the govt staff earlier than his first day. Not lengthy after, he ripped out a comparatively new $35 million digital health-record system, telling the board he wanted to put in the costlier Epic system as a substitute.
Somewhat than buying hospitals—the go-to technique for well being methods on the time—Grossman dedicated to constructing a community of outpatient amenities, appropriately anticipating that expertise would enable an growing share of procedures to be carried out exterior of hospitals. (That technique has paid off: Ambulatory amenities don’t require 24/7 staffing and are extra worthwhile.)
Relaying the occasions to me 18 years later, Grossman nonetheless appeared tickled by his personal audacity, and the truth that he has proven up naysayers, like a McKinsey marketing consultant who informed him he was doing too many issues too quick.
Satisfying too, was his expertise watching a category at Harvard Enterprise Faculty focus on NYU Langone, the case examine. The scholars struck Grossman as timid: They’d all considered his early administration purge—“Black Wednesday,” because it turned identified—as cataclysmic. “I didn’t assume it was any large deal,” he informed me. “I simply didn’t assume the establishment was functioning.”
Dr. Andrew Brotman, NYU Langone’s outgoing chief medical officer, recollects that Grossman fired individuals he was pleasant with that day, with no obvious anguish. That type of compartmentalization is “attribute of Bob,” he informed me. “He does what’s finest for the group.”
Fiona Druckenmiller, a former portfolio supervisor who joined NYU Langone’s board in 2006—and who will succeed Langone as chair on Sept. 1— describes Bob “as probably the most decisive individuals I’ve ever met.”
An all-seeing information ‘dashboard’
The important thing to decision-making at NYU Langone is the “dashboard,” a data-rich software that tracks greater than 800 metrics throughout the system in actual time. Grossman created the platform, which he refers to because the group’s “sole supply of fact,” with the assistance of a small, choose staff early in his tenure; he felt the enter of different managers would muddy his imaginative and prescient.
The dashboard captures the whole lot from instructor evaluations and high-impact publications to ICU mattress area and operating-room turnover time. It’s how Grossman obsessively manages the place, and the way the contribution of each division, doctor, nursing unit, and administrator is measured.
Huge information is hardly novel within the company world, however the analytics that has already revolutionized most industries has been slower to remodel well being care, as a result of clumsy IT methods, fragmented suppliers, and heightened privateness considerations. Maybe what units NYU Langone’s dashboard aside is its thoroughness and its centrality to the group.
I used to be wanting to see the dashboard information by way of Grossman’s eyes, and he agreed to present me an illustration one morning. He clicked by way of his go-to pages—one flagging trending information throughout the system, one other displaying emergency division stats. (Common “door to doc time” that morning: 13 minutes; common time in ER: 4.5 hours, which Grossman described as “rattling good.”) We appeared up his personal dashboard utilization (269 log-ins prior to now yr; sufficient to place him within the high 2.5% of the system’s customers, however nicely wanting his Chief of Hospital Operations, Dr. Fritz François, whose rely topped 4,000.)
The granularity of knowledge has been key to figuring out points and fixing them. Even earlier than the dashboard got here on-line, for instance, Grossman seen a quirk with the NYU Langone’s “case combine index,” a measure that displays the complexity of affected person circumstances and care offered. Grossman realized that physicians weren’t totally documenting circumstances, and because of this, weren’t being totally reimbursed for care. A significant documentation effort adopted, an train which helped flip across the group’s funds.
If Grossman has a north star metric, it’s “size of keep.” Hospital operations are extra worthwhile, in essence, when in-patient stays are brief, and so length-of-stay has change into an NYU Langone benchmark of focus. To some, that could sound sinister, like an incentive for kicking sufferers out earlier than they’re able to go house. However there’s appreciable proof that pointless time within the hospital can do sufferers extra hurt than good, growing their threat of an infection or different issues, that are additionally expensive for the system.
NYU Langone now has one of many nation’s lowest common lengths of keep—one thing Grossman might present me because of third-party information that populates the dashboard and permits evaluating NYU Langone to 115 different giant well being methods. He navigated over to a display screen rating hospitals by observed-to-expected mortality. The dashboard confirmed NYU Langone with the bottom mortality index, which Grossman identified earlier than considerably gleefully namechecking his lagging rivals. “New York-Presbyterian, most likely twice the mortality,” he famous, scanning the checklist. “College of Pennsylvania…Duke… Right here’s North Shore—4 occasions the mortality!” he exclaimed, breaking right into a hearty chuckle. (It needs to be famous that as a result of NYU Langone’s fee was very low—32 sufferers dying when 100 would have been anticipated to die in comparable circumstances—these opponents had demise charges that have been roughly according to or higher than {industry} requirements.)
“Bob may be very aggressive,” Druckenmiller later informed me, “He does hold observe of how everybody else is doing.”
The dashboard is essential to retaining operations on observe, however Grossman says it’s extra necessary impression has been on tradition. To make his level, he confirmed me the web page of a school member: Dr. Robert Montgomery, an award-winning transplant surgeon with a prodigious handlebar moustache. He identified the vary of accessible stats (on-time OR begins, affected person an infection charges, grant funding) and double-clicked on a number of to indicate how Montgomery ranked amongst colleagues. I requested if this function led some docs to obsessively examine their very own efficiency. “Effectively, that’s the conduct,” Grossman stated matter-of-factly. “That’s the way you change into primary.”
Are there any limitations to the metrics or circumstances the place they aren’t truthful? Loads of school members have challenged assessments that they’re underproductive, Grossman says, however when that occurs, he can merely level them to the dashboard: Why have they got zero grants or zero high-impact publications when others in the identical division have a number of? The measures are goal, he says, and the system totally clear.
Whilst I marveled on the information obtainable, I puzzled if the dashboard-driven tradition—half Moneyball, half panopticon— may really feel oppressive to some. “It’s not for everybody,” Brotman later informed me. “You’re on the hook 24/7, 365, and also you’ve obtained this vulnerability and this expectation of accountability. In case you don’t have the fitting disposition, it’s laborious to take care of.”
I felt awkward merely being within the room for moments of the “Snapshot Evaluation,” a gathering the place the chairs of medical departments filed onstage for dashboard-informed questioning from directors. The assessment classes, in an ethereal convention room overlooking the East River, diversified significantly in tone and substance. Some concerned reward and sensible problem-solving; others, discussions of “low-performing school members”; and one other—that includes a comparatively new chief who clearly hadn’t discovered his footing—the texture of a person pleading for mercy.
Over time, NYU Langone leaders have gotten higher at figuring out the individuals who purchase into the tradition and thrive, and people who don’t. (The well being system claims an approximate 10% annual worker turnover fee.) Who does thrive? Individuals who like information, who settle for that drugs is a science and never an artwork (NYU standardizes processes, proper all the way down to the surgical instruments used).
A theme that got here up in my interviews—considerably surprisingly, at a high-performing well being system—was how little individuals sleep. “Bob doesn’t flip off,” Druckenmiller stated of Grossman. She defined that loads of the hospital’s most necessary enterprise will get executed over cellphone calls at 4:30 within the morning, as a result of that’s an hour when Langone, Grossman, and she or he (and others) are all awake and never commuting but. She stated that Grossman’s successor, Dr. Alec Kimmelman, is that means too. (When Druckenmiller requested Kimmelman’s spouse if she was prepared for him to tackle the position, she answered she didn’t count on something would change—he was gone earlier than she wakened and residential after she went to mattress.) After I requested Langone how he managed all of it, he informed me, “I don’t sleep. The opposite man’s sleeping whereas I’m doing different stuff.”
The tradition of self-care has not but come for NYU Langone management, however work-life steadiness is on its radar. At a Snapshot assessment assembly I attended, there was dialogue of the outgoing infectious illness chief, and the way his “Iron Man Mannequin” was not as in-fashion with the youthful era of docs. Kimmelman, who comes throughout as considerate and laid-back, assured me NYU Langone’s tradition welcomes non-workaholics. What issues, he says, is that “even when their attitudes in direction of work-life steadiness are completely different than mine, they’re nonetheless dedicated to excellence and high quality and taking nice care of sufferers.”
Courtesy of NYU Langone Well being
On the time of my go to, I had simply completed watching The Pitt, the HBO medical drama centered on one chaotic, 15-hour shift in a Pittsburgh emergency room. All through the sequence, a suit-wearing, metrics-obsessed administrator drops by to scold the workers on the measures wherein they’re falling brief— wait occasions, affected person satisfaction scores, documentation—ratcheting up the strain on overstretched docs and nurses attempting to save lots of lives. One naturally sympathizes with the workers, however it may be simple to miss that the administrator’s objectives—nonetheless warped by the economics of the well being system—are literally within the curiosity of affected person care, or at the least of retaining the hospital’s doorways open. (Grossman hadn’t watched the present. “I don’t assume it’s my cup of tea,” he informed me.)
It may be simple to vilify micromanagement, however Dr. Oren Cahlon, a radiation oncologist who will take Brotman’s job in September—says it has been efficient at NYU Langone.
Lately Cahlon had been digging into affected person entry points—the lengthy wait occasions new sufferers face to make appointments at NYU. He’d been plumbing physicians’ schedules, drawing up new insurance policies—How usually did sufferers really want follow-up appointments? May a few of these present sufferers see a nurse practitioner or doctor assistant as a substitute? —and even altering compensation fashions to incentivize suppliers to see new sufferers. Brotman approvingly in contrast Cahlon’s work to “guerilla warfare,” noting that he’d managed to extend new-patient appointments by 10% to 40%. It hadn’t instantly gone over nicely, however Brotman and Cahlon had engaged workers and sufferers in regards to the causes for the adjustments. Opposite to the considerations that including extra sufferers would trigger burnout and tank satisfaction scores, Brotman says they’ve seen the alternative.
Taking the enterprise mannequin exterior Manhattan
A 30-minute ferry experience from NYU’s gleaming Manhattan campus delivers you to the well being system’s Brooklyn hospital, on the commercial fringes of Sundown Park. The power, wrapped in scaffolding as a result of ongoing renovation, is shabbier than the midtown mothership. It serves a various inhabitants, a lot of whom aren’t native English audio system, and 82% of whom rely on authorities insurance coverage.
However the care and more and more the vary of companies match these again at headquarters. Since NYU Langone accomplished its merger with Lutheran, a struggling neighborhood hospital, in 2016, its affected person security and well being end result measures have vastly improved. (Noticed-to-expected mortality has fallen 60% since 2017; issues have come down 58%.) And it’s worthwhile this yr, as a result of it’s seeing extra sufferers, and seeing them extra effectively.
Getting there concerned a few years of taking the identical fine-tooth-comb data-driven method to hospital operations. When NYU took over, a lot of the docs there have been contractors, and the under-resourced facility was working with outdated infrastructure and expertise: Cardiologists, for instance, would view electrocardiograms on VHS tapes.
Courtesy of NYU Langone Well being
There’s usually suspicion and worry when a big well being system acquires a smaller neighborhood hospital, and it’s well-founded; large methods usually strip their acquisitions of companies and ship sufferers to their bigger amenities for classy care. NYU Langone met with comparable skepticism, however the consequence has been the alternative: it invested within the Brooklyn hospital, employed a full-time workers, and added a spread of higher-end companies—cardiac catheterization labs, neurosurgery, most cancers care—bringing care into the neighborhood.
The day I visited, I discovered Dr. Bret Rudy, chief of hospital operations, in his workplace, finding out dashboard information on a big monitor. It was 9:45 a.m., and thus far, 41 sufferers had arrived within the emergency division; seven have been ready for beds, together with one whose digital profile he clicked on for my profit, who was being admitted for a doable case of tuberculosis. Rudy navigated to working stats—the place 92% of the day’s first procedures that month had began on time. “That needs to be larger,” he stated, explaining that turnaround time between procedures needs to be half-hour or much less. The dashboard had allowed him and a pair of surgeons he’d deputized to optimize workflow, investigating late begins and rooting out inefficiencies. Since 2017, they’ve elevated the variety of surgical procedures by greater than 20% (a complete of two,000 extra surgical procedures per yr), by way of disciplined scheduling and 6 a.m. start-times.
9 years in, NYU Langone Hospital-Brooklyn is virtually a well-oiled machine. The entrance traces of NYU’s transformation effort have shifted to Patchogue, a city on 12,000 on Lengthy Island, the place it lately accomplished a merger with a neighborhood hospital, now generally known as NYU Langone Hospital-Suffolk. Suffolk County is famed for the glitzy Hamptons, however nearer to Patchogue it’s house to working-class cities troubled by the opioid epidemic and MS-13 gang exercise.
The Suffolk County hospital was in tough form when NYU Langone entered the image a number of years in the past; after years of underinvestment, its repute had suffered, and sufferers that ended up there tended to be both very sick or accident victims introduced in from the Lengthy Island Expressway. Different well being methods had thought-about buying the hospital however at all times walked away; Dr. Marc Adler, chief of hospital operations, recollects that when he first launched himself, a workers member stated, “You’ll be gone in three months.”
Adler is now a number of years into the job, implementing the NYU Langone playbook. The affected person inhabitants is basically lined by Medicare and Medicaid, and it suffers from higher ranges of substance abuse and psychological well being points than NYU Langone-Brooklyn’s does. Amongst NYU’s first investments have been a bigger safety workers and a brand new behavioral well being facility; surgical robots and new working rooms have been added too. They’ve employed a brand new full-time workers, some poached from NYU’s hospital in neighboring Nassau County.
There had been loads of room for effectivity enhancements on the hospital. “If everybody’s coming in at 9 a.m., you’re by no means going to start out your circumstances at 7 a.m.,” says Adler. Solely 30% of the day’s first surgical procedures began on time in 2021. The docs, who have been on contract and would cease by just a few days per week, erred on the aspect of longer stays—retaining sufferers within the hospital over the weekend or for one more day in the event that they hadn’t seen them.
Adler in fact, confirmed me his dashboard. The standard of care and affected person outcomes are a lot improved over the previous few years, and over 90% of the day’s first circumstances now begin on time. NYU Langone Hospital-Suffolk has a “C” security grade by the requirements of Leapfrog Group, a hospital rating group—all different NYU hospitals have an “A”—however Adler explains it’s as a result of Leapfrog’s methodology, which depends on information from as much as three years prior. NYU Langone executives say the extent of care is now equal to the system’s different hospitals.
Federal cuts, private triumphs
Like different nonprofit well being methods, NYU Langone is dealing with cuts to Medicaid and NIH funding. Final yr, the NYU Grossman Faculty of Drugs ranked 11th when it comes to NIH awards, with $490 million in funding based on the Blue Ridge Institute for Medical Analysis, which tracks the sector. In accordance with BRIMR’s evaluation, NYU’s medical college has thus far had a handful of grants price $12 million terminated; 56 faculties had higher losses in funding.
“Clearly we expect lots about that,” Kimmelman, Grossman’s successor, tells me. Like loads of establishments, NYU Langone is taking a look at methods to diversify analysis funding from different sources, and a few affected researchers have needed to pivot.
On the similar time, Kimmelman says his staff is attempting to not let the uncertainty distract them from their mission or the varied growth initiatives already in movement. He takes inspiration from Grossman, who within the depths of COVID, a financially perilous interval, didn’t hesitate to put money into necessary however extraordinarily costly expertise. The choice got here all the way down to impression on affected person care. “I believe our fundamentals are extremely stable,” Kimmelman says. “If we will’t thrive or survive in no matter occurs to NIH, I don’t assume there’s going to be any well being care system that may.”
It’s not the primary time a dire scenario has largely been out of NYU Langone’s management. Many vividly keep in mind the night time in 2012 when Hurricane Sandy plunged decrease Manhattan and NYU Langone (its turbines failed) into darkness, flooding the Manhattan campus and shuttering the hospital and medical college for a number of weeks. “I believed it was throughout,” says Brotman.
Langone occurred to be a affected person that night time, recovering from pneumonia. He was evacuated from the 17th flooring at 3 a.m., together with 23 infants staying within the neo-natal intensive care unit. Langone vividly remembers following the procession—the infants nonetheless connected to tubes, each cradled by a nurse mendacity on a sled, whereas others rigorously carried the sled and medical gear down the pitch-dark stairway—and the sound of nurses, in excellent unison, saying “Step, step, step,” till they made it to the bottom flooring.
John Minchillo—AP Picture
It’s nonetheless one in every of his proudest moments. And as instrumental as he has been to NYU Langone’s restoration and its broader accomplishments, the day I visited him Langone saved steering me again to the system’s smaller, anecdotal triumphs—just like the too-scared-to-sleep coronary heart transplant affected person who was comforted in the midst of the night time by a sort constructing companies employee.
Whereas Grossman’s laser deal with industry-leading care is filtered by way of an obsessive, data-driven wonkiness, Langone relishes the human tales, the dwelling, respiratory proof their work has made a distinction. On his desk, behind containers of Dots Christmas sweet, framed images, and an indication that reads “The Buck Stops Right here,” have been playing cards that he’d sometimes choose up mid-conversation and browse to me—from grateful sufferers, or relations, or former workers, thanking him for his or her expertise at NYU Langone. “I’ve obtained a bunch of them,” he informed me, as if the testimonies answered all remaining questions. He at all times writes a observe again.
