Satisfaction rises

Sonenreich said the management changes at Mount Sinai have produced a more balanced approach to decision-making by the medical and administrative leaders in each department: “The common thread here is having an environment of cooperation where our department chairs and administrative directors are all co-pilots.” The management changes have contributed to improved morale among the hospital’s 3,000-plus employees, he said. “It’s reflected in our patient satisfaction scores.”

Quarterly patient-satisfaction surveys conducted for Mount Sinai by an outside vendor show that the hospital’s overall score, based on the percentage of patients who reported the highest levels of satisfaction, averaged 71.8 percent last year, compared to 68 percent in 2011.

Patient admissions at Mount Sinai have been flat, about 23,000 annually in recent years, but revenue-per-patient has risen. The hospital’s physicians have been doing more surgeries and delivering more emergency-room care, treating patients who reside near the hospital’s main campus in Miami Beach and many more who live elsewhere.

“Seventy-five percent of our patients come from outside our immediate Zip Code area,” Sonenreich said, and many of them are drawn by the reputation of the 672-bed hospital in such medical specialties as heart surgery and cancer treatment. Miami Beach residents alone “could not support an institution of this size and capability, so we need to draw people from across the causeway, from across the bay.”

Cardiac care

Among other distinctions, Mount Sinai has the best heart-attack survival rate of any hospital in Florida, according to the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. The state Agency for Health Care Administration (ACHA) has reported that Mount Sinai has the best cardiac-surgery survival rate among Florida hospitals with a high volume of complex cases. ACHA data also show that, since 2009, more cardiac valve surgeries and cardiac bypass surgeries have been performed at Mount Sinai than at any other South Florida hospital.

Key were a partnership with New York’s Columbia University and the recruitment of Dr. Joseph Lamelas, a pioneer in minimally invasive heart valve surgery. He joined Mount Sinai in 2008 as chief of cardiac surgery and has become a feature attraction at the hospital.

“He is the best cardiac surgeon, in my opinion, in the state of Florida, for sure, and probably in the Southeast,” said Dr. Gervasio Lamas, chief of the Columbia University Division of Cardiology at Mount Sinai.

Less famous but no less important, Lamas said, are the hospital’s emergency room clerks, who are trained to ask possible heart-attack patients medical questions first, not “Hey, do you have insurance? ... Every minute you wait, more of the heart has died, and that’s irreversible, so you need to stop the progressive cell death.”

U.S. News & World Report ranked Mount Sinai as the seventh-best hospital in southeast Florida and 16th-best in the state in the publication’s 2012-2013 survey of the nation’s best hospitals. The survey classified the hospital’s programs in cardiology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, geriatrics, neurology, urology and other specialties as “high-performing.”

Like Miami-Dade’s Baptist Heath and Broward’s Memorial Health Care System, Mount Sinai gets some of its patients from its network of outpatient facilities, including two in Coral Gables and one each in Hialeah and Key Biscayne, all of which have opened since 2009. The hospital also has a freestanding, full-service emergency department in Aventura that opened in 2008.