Downtown Hospital Joins Presbyterian
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The Downtown Hospital joined the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System late last year, making final its separation from New York University after a partnership of several decades.
The signs with NYU’s characteristic violet dot were removed as of December 31, 2005, a Downtown Hospital spokeswoman, Vanessa Warner, said. In their place are temporary banners with the hospital’s new logo, which will be displayed until the new permanent signs are ready.
Downtown Hospital’s alliance with New York-Presbyterian, which is the system of Columbia and Cornell universities, is the equivalent of a business changing partners or working under new management, the president of the Greater New York Hospital Association, Kenneth Raske, said.
“You would find the same thing in corporate America,” Mr. Raske, an independent observer of the deal, said. “People buy a company and they spin it off.”
New York-Presbyterian has hospitals, specialty institutes, and continuing care centers in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Large systems such as this are efficient because they can share technology, standardize billing procedure, and strengthen their negotiating power with health maintenance organizations, Mr. Raske said.
The disengagement of NYU and the hospital is another step the university has taken to dismantle the once large health service organization it was part of from 1998 to 2003.
In 1998, the university joined with Mount Sinai to create Mount Sinai NYU Health, which included seven hospitals and institutes at locations in Manhattan and Queens.
The system was lauded as one of the most geographically expansive systems in the city, but it was bogged down by operating difficulties caused in part by each side’s refusal to fuse completely with the other, according to news reports.
Five years later, the university and Mount Sinai dissolved their affiliations.
During the late 1990s, many hospitals allied themselves with each other to streamline operations and reduce costs, including NYU with Mount Sinai, North Shore University Hospital with Long Island Jewish Medical Center, and Presbyterian Hospital with New York Hospital. The latter two systems are still in place.
