In its first year, Northwell Studios, the entertainment production arm of the New Hyde Park, N.Y.-based health system, has greenlit four projects and started developing a major motion picture.
The health system had been hosting documentary filmmakers for years before formalizing the production venture last summer. However, it’s not a studio in the traditional sense.
“We didn’t build a sound stage or studio,” Ramon Soto, senior vice president and chief marketing and communications officer of Northwell Health, told Becker’s. “The 19 million square feet of Northwell and our 200-plus operating rooms — those are literally the stages that we use to film the content.”
The 21-hospital system, the largest in New York, was first featured in a TV series in 2020, Netflix’s “Lenox Hill,” which documented the work of four physicians at Northwell’s Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. The docuseries had 40 million hours of viewership in the two months after its release.
“We greenlit the project more as an effort around the brand, and that’s where the benefits of it just started to germinate, and that led to more people coming out to us to pitch ideas,” Mr. Soto said.
“The First Wave,” released by National Geographic in 2021, chronicled the outbreak of COVID-19 at a Northwell hospital. That was followed by “Emergency: NYC,” also on Netflix, which tracked the professional and personal lives of Northwell trauma physicians, in 2023. Then came “One South: Portrait of a Psych Unit” on HBO, which profiled college students who tried to commit suicide, in 2024.
“Because we liked the platform so much, we wanted to build some business process around it, and wanted to make sure that we were treating it as the for-profit entity that it is … and make sure we’re paying our fair share of taxes on the projects that we’re doing and any revenue that comes in associated with it,” Mr. Soto said. “Instead of doing one project every 18 months, we really want to publish two projects a year, and we’re excited to be on the right path to executing that.”
Since Northwell Studios launched in July 2024, filming has begun on a docuseries depicting the lives of the next generation of physicians undergoing training. The health system is publishing a book about six Michelin-star chefs reimagining food at Northwell Health. A documentary, set to air on the Science Channel and stream on the Discovery Channel, will showcase Northwell’s development of bioelectronic medicine, which uses electronic pulses to treat disease. Northwell Studios is also working on a pilot about the U.S. fertility crisis.
Another 10 projects are in development, including a major motion picture that would be filmed at Northwell and feature the health system prominently (though focus on a more human story about the practice of medicine).
“It’s very important to emphasize that we’re not doing this for the money side of the equation,” Mr. Soto said. “We’re doing this for the storytelling side of the equation.”
He pointed to the first episode of “Emergency: NYC,” which spotlights dozens of Northwell staffers rushing to save the life of a gunshot victim.
“In 2019, guns became the leading cause of death of children in this country, and most people don’t know that — only about 25% of society knows that statistic — and it’s going to take a thousand acts large and small, including talking about this in really meaningful ways, to bend the curve on it,” Mr. Soto said.
Netflix, he noted, is translated into 50-plus languages for its 270 million global subscribers. “It’s helped us break out of the New York market and build more of a national brand, and, quite frankly, an international brand on the content that we’ve created,” he said.
The projects have been mostly “cost-neutral” so far, with investment mostly in staff but very little in “hard dollars,” Mr. Soto said; any profit would be reinvested into the health system. Employees, for instance, closely review content to make sure patient privacy is protected. The health system gets permission before featuring any patient; for “Emergency: NYC,” only 1 in 20 patients agreed to be on film. “You need patients who are in the right state of mind, who can consent to content capture before we’ll deploy any cameras to the actual scene,” Mr. Soto said.
Northwell has both the patient consent and filming processes “honed down to a science,” Mr. Soto said: “There’s no rigging in any of our hospitals. It’s a low-impact film crew. It’s literally no sound people. One camera shot, low-impact camera. We’ve really refined this to an art to gain the best content we can in a really thoughtful way that is not intrusive to the delivery of care.”
Mr. Soto explained how the business end of these deals typically works: “The distributors will buy the IP [intellectual property] and Northwell will be the brand that is represented in the medical content, be the stage with which we tell the stories. Our physicians will be the principal characters and the content. Our patients will be the principal characters in the content. But the economic gain is really made by the studios or the showrunners who help produce and edit the content we develop.”
While other hospitals and health systems have been featured in films and documentaries, Northwell is in a “category of its own” from a production standpoint, Mr. Soto said. Northwell Studios is also an acknowledgement of the different ways people consume media these days.
“Most health systems, they’ll do an advertising campaign, they’ll create a 30-second spot, they’ll talk about being the best at heart care or the neurosciences. But if you think about that approach to building relationships, you’re only talking to a tiny fraction of the addressable market,” Mr. Soto said. “We thought we could tap into the power of entertainment, and fandom in particular, and create really accessible content that invites people behind the glass to see the real special things that we do within our health system, or talk about really important social issues.”
