Mt. Sinai Pays Millions to Lure Top Harvard Surgeons

When New York’s Mt. Sinai Medical Center hired a team of surgeons from Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) Brigham and Women’s Hospital early this month, doctors and media alike began talking about the role of money and politics in medicine.

The millions of dollars Mt. Sinai was rumored to have paid for the team, as well as the full-page ad it ran in the New York Times announcing that “the best just got better,” turned what some call a routine hiring into a political squabble.

The Boston Globe’s Feb. 12 story only raised the level of attention paid to the hire.

Several Brigham surgeons compared the current situation to the media firestorm that ensued when professors in Harvard’s Afro-American studies department were considering departing for Princeton.

“Medicine, [Afro-American] studies, it’s the same” said Dr. Lawrence Cohn, the chief of cardiac surgery at Brigham. “If you’re good, people try to lure you away. You can use that for your advantage.”

Mt. Sinai’s new team of four cardiac and thoracic surgeons is led by renowned surgeon Dr. David Adams, formerly an associate departmental chief and assistant professor at Brigham.

He now chairs Mt. Sinai’s Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery. Adams’ hiring concludes Mt. Sinai’s intensive, year-long search for a new cardiovascular chair.

Brigham doctors said the hire was Mt. Sinai’s attempt to improve the quality and luster of its surgical staff—and to improve its finances. One of New York’s premier hospitals, Mt. Sinai regularly sustains losses in the tens of millions of dollars.

Some have also suggested that more individual factors played roles in the exodus.

“Egos are inevitably going to get involved,” said Dr. Nicholas Tilney, a renal surgeon at Brigham and HMS professor.

“Cardiac surgery is big stuff and you have to have faith in your own abilities. Adams wanted to be his own man and run his own show,” Tilney added.

Tilney and Cohn said the staff changes have not hurt Brigham and may actually benefit the teaching hospital. Brigham’s head of surgery, Dr. Michael Zinner, has already recruited new surgeons for the department, Cohn said.

‘We have plenty of people. We were oversupplied and more than able to spare the surgeons,” Cohn said. “The move was good for everybody. Good for the hospital, and good for them.”

In a newsletter, the director of Mt. Sinai’s cardiovascular institute, Dr. Valentin Fuster said the search committee “interviewed numerous candidates, seeking an academic leader of outstanding scholarly achievement who would bring innovative surgical approaches.”

According to the newsletter The committee also sought someone with a commitment to teaching and a “collegial personal style.”

“Dr. Adams personifies each of these characteristics to a degree virtually unparalleed in the world today,” Fuster wrote in the newsletter.

Adams, who declined comment for this story, told The Globe that “the decison was never for the money,” but rather for the chance to build the cardiovascular department at Mt. Sinai.

But Cohn said Adams’ monetary gain should not be overlooked.

‘He got a good financial deal,” Cohn said. “Despite what he said [in The Globe] that’s quite important. More power to him.”