Mount Sinai Feels the Holiday Cheer with $21 Million in Donations

Mount Sinai Hospital is in New York City.

Hospitals are aging. Unfortunately, patients are, too. As the baby boomer generation ages, hospitals are seeing a huge influx of patients that are older, sicker, and need more care. The problem is that many hospitals themselves are running short on funding and have been for some time. This means that facilities are becoming outdated and are less able to afford quality care in times of need (which, these days, is pretty much all the time).

Mount Sinai Hospital is an internationally acclaimed tertiary-care teaching facility and hospital. It is joined with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and the Kravis Children’s Hospital at Mount Sinai in the overarching Mount Sinai Health System. The hospital is supported by a number of prestigious businesspeople, including James Tisch, Henry Kravis, Carl Icahn, and Kenneth Mehlman.

Luckily, thanks to generous individuals, hospitals like Mount Sinai are able to update their facilities. Mount Sinai recently received a generous $6 million donation from Jay and Barbara Hennick, money that will go toward updating the hospital’s 40-year-old building. The hospital will build a brand new healing and respite area with six new floors, 19 state-of-the-art operating rooms, eight modernized inpatient unites, and even a new neonatal unit.

Generous donations from Reisman, Schwartz, and the Hennicks
will allow the hospital to update its facilities and research programs.
Image: Shutterstock

And more recently, the hospital received a $15 million donation from Indigo Books founder Heather Reisman and her husband, Gerald Schwartz, who is founder and CEO of Onex Corp. This donation will enable the hospital to more than double the space of the emergency care center and make it much more senior friendly. Both the $6 million and the $15 million donations are a part of the hospital's campaign to raise $500 million for upgrades to the facilities and research programs.

“We are looking after patients that are sicker than before and we are dealing with more complex issues than before,” said vice-president of patient experience Matthew Morgan. “We’ve had to begin modernizing our building to deal with the volume and complexities of our population.”

Mount Sinai is one of many hospitals planning for the future and putting generous donations to good use. Recently, I wrote about another amazing hospital donation—a $20 million gift from the Dalio Foundation to the New York Presbyterian Hospital and the Weill Cornell Medical College. In that case, the money will be used to launch a brand new cardiovascular center.

Despite the fact that times have been hard on hospitals in recent years, it’s good to see that at least a handful are able to put money to good use and create better and more innovative care facilities.