Attending the ribbon-cutting were, from left: Larry Attia, MD, Associate Medical Director for Clinical Informatics, Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai West; family members Ela Navarro, Clara Jones, and Cody Jones; Arthur Gianelli, MBA, MPH; Timothy Day, Chief Operating Officer, Mount Sinai West; Peter and Bridget Jones, the parents of the late James P. Jones, MD; and Lucy Xenophon, MD, MPH.
Mount Sinai St. Luke’s celebrated the opening of The James P. Jones Daily Management and Incident Command Center on Wednesday, December 5, with a ribbon-cutting and dedication ceremony. James P. Jones, MD, who passed away unexpectedly in December 2016, served as Vice President of Administration for Mount Sinai West and Senior Medical Director of Clinical Documentation Quality Improvement for the Mount Sinai Health System.
With astounding energy and passion, he led collaborative efforts across the Health System to enhance clinical and operational outcomes at all levels of care.
“Dr. Jones’s commitment to enhancing patient care, experience, and outcomes was apparent throughout his 16-year career,” said Arthur A. Gianelli, MBA, MPH, President of Mount Sinai St. Luke’s. “We are honored to dedicate this Center to a wonderful friend, teacher, and colleague who touched the lives of so many of us.” At the ceremony were 140 Mount Sinai colleagues, friends, and family members, including Dr. Jones’s widow, Clara, and their son, Cody.
The late James P. Jones, MD
The Daily Management and Incident Command Center is the first of its kind in the Health System and was created in partnership with the Epic Clinical Transformation Group, the IT Program Management Office, and the Mount Sinai St. Luke’s Lean Team, an effort that also involved a number of other multidisciplinary groups. It was established to serve as a real-time operational monitoring hub for Mount Sinai St. Luke’s, with the goal of improving patient flow and daily hospital operations. It also is outfitted to act as an incident command center in times of hospital emergencies.
“The opening of this Center reflects the commitment and passion of many people throughout the Health System over the last 18 months to harness real-time hospital data to improve, on a daily basis, the way in which we deliver health care,” said Lucy Xenophon, MD, MPH, Chief Transformation Officer at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and co-founder of the Center. “I can think of no other tribute to James that is more fitting to honor his legacy of intelligence, humor, respect, and courage to fight for continuous improvement.”
A long-term international study led by researchers at Mount Sinai Heart is helping to establish an optimal standard of care for patients with diabetes and advanced multivessel coronary artery disease—a group at high risk for heart attack and stroke.
The FREEDOM Follow-On Study found that patients in this group who are treated with coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG) survive significantly longer than those treated with percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with drug-eluting stents.
Over a period of seven and one-half years, mortality from all causes was 18.7 percent for the CABG group and 23.7 percent for the PCI cohort. The study found that younger patients fared the best, with the difference most significant for those under age 63. “These data support current recommendations that CABG be considered the preferred strategy for patients with diabetes and multivessel disease,” says the study’s principal investigator, Valentin Fuster, MD, PhD, Director of Mount Sinai Heart, and Physician-in-Chief of The Mount Sinai Hospital.
During CABG, a healthy artery or vein from the body is connected, or grafted, to the blocked coronary artery, providing a bypass around the blocked portion of the coronary artery. In PCI—a minimally invasive procedure also known as angioplasty—a catheter is threaded through the body to a blocked or occluded vessel in the heart. The occlusion is removed and a drug-eluting stent is often inserted to maintain flow within the blood vessel.
The FREEDOM Follow-On Study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in November 2018, is the successor to the FREEDOM (Future Revascularization Evaluation in Patients with Diabetes Mellitus: Optimal Management of Multivessel Disease) trial, which randomized 1,900 patients with diabetes. That original study, which concluded in 2012, found that individuals who have diabetes and advanced coronary artery disease live longer and are less likely to suffer a nonfatal heart attack when treated with CABG instead of PCI with drug-eluting stents. The median follow-up time of that trial—just under four years—was considered relatively short, however, because of the prolonged nature of atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease.
Consequently, Mount Sinai developed a longer-term follow-up study, and 25 of the original international centers agreed to participate, tracking data on the mortality of 943 patients from the original FREEDOM trial. Adults with diabetes are two to four times more likely to die from heart disease than those without it, according to the American Heart Association.
In addition to confirming a standard of care for such patients, the study’s results underscore the importance of aggressive medical treatment and prevention to keep them from reaching advanced stages of diabetes, hypertension, and high cholesterol—forestalling the need for either CABG or PCI, Dr. Fuster says.
“We have to pay attention to how we can prevent this late stage of disease by taking care of obesity,” he says. “About 70 percent of these patients were obese, and we can do a lot to prevent this.”
Mount Sinai has released episode seven of the monthly podcast series, Road To Resilience, which details how active coping skills can help you recover from losing a loved one. In this podcast, Rosalind J. Wright, MD, Dean of Translational Biomedical Research at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, explains how she used this resilience factor to cope with the murder of her brother and how that would shape her renowned career.
“It’s been a fascinating career path that I would have never had the courage to take had it not been for this incredible loss. Often times as I’m working, I’ll light a candle so he’s right here next to me because it’s his career just as much as it is mine,” Dr. Wright says. She hopes that sharing her story will help others cope with the death of a family member or close friend. “There’s a light at the end of the tunnel. Your life is going to be changed forever, but try to find ways it will be positively changed. The more you can do that and live for the positive and seek the positive in tragedies like that, it’s amazing the good and growth that can come out of it.”
In the episode, Dr. Wright describes the grief she experienced when she lost her brother at the same time she was caring for her newborn daughter and finishing up her residency. She explains how his unexpected death took a toll on the mental and physical health of both her and her family. These challenges led Dr. Wright to become fascinated with how trauma can affect your physical well-being, and she wanted to learn more about this on a scientific level. She then applied active coping skills during this challenging time and made a big decision to switch gears from studying genetics to pursuing a career in public health.
“I started thinking people need to understand how grief can embed itself in the body and change how you are biologically. I wanted to know how it relates to increasing problems like hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and asthma,” Dr. Wright says.
Dr. Wright went on to conduct groundbreaking research focusing on inner-city populations and violence. She discovered living in a high-stress environment can have a direct impact on your immune system and can change your biology to the point where you’re at risk of developing chronic diseases, including asthma. Dr. Wright also researched the health consequences of poverty and stress. She found exposure to more pollution, a lack of nutritious food, and living in housing with mold and rodents can also make you more prone to these diseases. Her work can now pave the way for prevention and solutions.
“This is going to—more than anything in my career in medicine—finally have great impact on reducing the growth in chronic diseases that we’re seeing,” she says. “If we know what your past exposures have been that affect your health and understand it in a comprehensive way, we can start to understand what factors can push you back on a health track. As a clinician this is so exciting, and I hope this will translate into improved health for the next generations.”
The “Road to Resilience” podcast is based on the well-received book Resilience: The Science of Mastering Life’s Greatest Challenges, co-authored by Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and Steven Southwick, MD, Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University. It features thought-provoking insight from renowned experts as they explain the science behind resilience. The work has been so well received the book now has a second edition.
The book identifies 10 resilience factors to help anyone become stronger when facing life’s greatest challenges and they explain how these can be learned at any stage of life. Each podcast episode focuses on different factors including having optimism, a support system, and role models, along with physical and brain fitness. The monthly series features insight from different Mount Sinai experts as they explain the science behind resilience while sharing their personal stories and experiences.
Episode 8 of Mount Sinai Future You features a teen with autism who opted to have a special device implanted on his brain to stop debilitating seizures. Saadi Ghatan, MD, Chair of Neurosurgery at Mount Sinai West and Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Director of the Pediatric Neurosurgery Program of the Mount Sinai Health System, and Lara Marcuse, MD, Co-director of the Mount Sinai Epilepsy Program, explain how this implantation can detect electrical activity and normalize brain waves to stop a seizure in its tracks.
Other stories include:
Anne Schaefer, MD, PhD, Associate Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and her team are honored with the Inventor of the Year award for their discovery of a potential cure for epileptic seizures
Joseph D. Buxbaum, PhD, Director of The Seaver Autism Center at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, shares the importance of personalized medicine in treating autism
Alexander Kolevzon, MD, Clinical Director of The Seaver Autism Center at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, discusses how the causes of autism may be in our genes
Bonnie M. Davis, Trustee of The Mount Sinai Hospital, and alumni of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, reflects on how her medical school experience led to her study of Alzheimer’s disease
Denise Cai, PhD, Assistant Professor of Neuroscience, uses an advanced microscope to read brain activity of neurons associated with post-traumatic stress disorder
Michelle Lin, MD, Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine, discusses how population health is linked to changes in emergency room care
In a first-person account published online by the Association of American Medical Colleges, Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System, describes his journey of survival and a highly publicized recovery after being ambushed by a gunman who had intentionally targeted him. As a physician-scientist who has studied resilience, he also offers a road map for recovery that helped him and could help others.
“The Adolescent Health Center enabled me to take advantage of opportunities that might have otherwise been out of reach,” says Mary Medina.
In 1949, Mary Medina’s mom came to New York from her native Puerto Rico at nine years old. By the age of 20, she was a single mother of four and was determined to give her children a different life than the one she had had.
So when she heard about the Mount Sinai Adolescent Health Center, she took her kids there for primary care and reproductive health services to make sure they had the care and information that would enable them to get an education and start a career without the challenges of teen pregnancy.
Ms. Medina, who grew up with her mom and three brothers in East Harlem and the Bronx, was 13 at her first visit. It was easy to talk to the health care providers there and ask them questions about sex and contraception.
To her mother’s relief, she succeeded in grammar and high school, and she went to college. That was followed by more achievements: She continued on to graduate school, where she received a Master of Social Work and also a law degree.
Today, Mary Medina, JD, MSW, remembers her introduction to Mount Sinai. “When I was a child, my mom first took us to the pediatric clinic, and then to the Adolescent Health Center. I grew up there,” Ms. Medina says.
Years later, after she completed her training, she learned about a position at The Mount Sinai Medical Center, as it was then known. “It was a no brainer for me to apply,” she says. “It was where I felt I belonged. I’ve always considered Mount Sinai my home.”
Ms. Medina spent more than 16 years working at Mount Sinai, eventually attaining the position of Director of Government Relations. It was a significant step in launching Ms. Medina’s successful 35-year career in health care, which included positions as Chief of Staff to the Chairman of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation, and Executive Director of the Greater New York Hospital Association. Today, she is a part-time attorney in private practice, serves on the Board of Directors of the Health Care Chaplaincy Network, and is a volunteer end-of-life doula.
Ms. Medina says, “The Adolescent Health Center enabled me to take advantage of opportunities that might have otherwise been out of reach.”
In a first-person account published online by the Association of American Medical Colleges, Dennis S. Charney, MD, Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and President for Academic Affairs, Mount Sinai Health System, describes his journey of survival and a highly publicized recovery after being ambushed by a gunman who had intentionally targeted him. As a physician-scientist who has studied resilience, he also offers a road map for recovery that helped him and could help others.