The Emergency Departments at St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals started transferring pediatric cases to The Mount Sinai Hospital on Tuesday, October 1, a day after the creation of the Mount Sinai Health System. These patient transfers are among the first systemwide synergies to be implemented throughout the seven campuses, and point to the fluidity of the Health System’s Inter-Hospital Transfer Center, which is open seven days a week, 24 hours a day.

According to Dan Wiener, MD, Associate Medical Director, and Chairman of the Department of Emergency Medicine at St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals, most of the cases have been children in respiratory distress brought on by asthma or pneumonia, or those at risk for respiratory deterioration. He says the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at St. Luke’s and Roosevelt Hospitals offers primarily specialized postoperative endovascular and neurosurgical care. Prior to the establishment of the Health System, acutely ill pediatric patients were often transferred to the PICU at Columbia University Medical Center.

The new arrangement with Kravis Children’s Hospital at Mount Sinai “offers an integrated spectrum of pediatric care,” Dr. Wiener adds. “Some patients fall into a gray area between needing to be transferred to the intensive care unit or to a hospital bed for further treatment. It is nice knowing that we can just make a call to Mount Sinai and their answer is ‘yes, we can take the patient.’ Then we enter into a medical discussion about what the appropriate level of care should be.”

Mount Sinai’s Transfer Center is available to physicians and patients at 800-TO-SINAI, or www.mountsinai.org/access on smart phones, tablets, or computers, and by filling in the appropriate information. Transfer coordinators are available to seamlessly connect the patient’s doctor with a Mount Sinai doctor, gather the patient’s demographics and insurance information, and arrange transportation. Patients can be directly admitted to an operating room, a cardiac catheterization suite, an intensive care unit, and for interventional radiology services.

“Our ability to transfer sicker patients has been improved by the creation of the Mount Sinai Health System,” says Dr. Wiener. “The idea that we will have access to clinical institutes of excellence throughout the system will be one of the enhanced values of being part of the Mount Sinai Health System, and will provide better care for patients.”