In his 18 years at the helm, Robert Grossman, MD, has led New York City-based NYU Langone Health through significant transformation.
The organization operated as a small regional hospital with $2 billion in revenue in 2007. Today, it is one of the largest academic health systems in the Northeast, with seven inpatient locations, more than 320 outpatient sites, two tuition-free medical schools and a vast research enterprise. NYU Langone posted $14.2 billion in revenue in 2024, a figure Dr. Grossman expects will be higher in its next financial report.
Now, Dr. Grossman is preparing to retire at the end of August as CEO of NYU Langone and dean of NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Alec Kimmelman, MD, PhD — a researcher, radiation oncologist and longtime NYU Langone leader — will succeed him Sept. 1. Dr. Grossman will take on a new role as executive vice president to the NYU Langone board of trustees.
A number of key leadership decisions shaped NYU Langone’s transformation during Dr. Grossman’s tenure. He noted the operational and administrative integration of NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Langone Hospital into a unified structure as crucial.
“I’m the dean and CEO, and everyone who works here at the highest and lower administrative levels of both the school and hospital has the same titles,” he said. “We have very low administrative costs, differentiating us from most other academic medical centers. So integration was really powerful.”
He also pointed to the elimination of the hospital president role, which was part of the integration, as well as the organization’s shift in 2007 toward an ambulatory care-focused business model rather than an inpatient hospital-centric model.
“A lot of hospitals have a dean or dean/CEO, but then they have a hospital president,” he explained. “And by eliminating the title of hospital president, I forged integration with operations and the faculty practice.”
Additionally, NYU Langone made major investments in healthcare IT starting in the early days of Dr. Grossman’s leadership.
“We chose Epic early,” he said. “We were [a pioneer in using Epic for state-level billing in New York], and we developed a data warehouse and a very superb contemporaneous dashboard with 800 elements in it, a lot of drill downs, and so we manage to the metrics.
“Once you have the data, you can hold everybody accountable to benchmarking.”
But perhaps among the most important aspects of his tenure, Dr. Grossman said, was the shift to an aspirational culture and one focused on quality, safety and excellence. As NYU Langone works to strengthen its financial position in a particularly challenging time in the industry, he highlighted the importance of the system’s “secret sauce.”
“It’s about excellence, and excellence is cost effective,” he said. “So if you do all the right things in the hospital — you make the right diagnosis, you treat [patients] appropriately, you move them in and out, you have efficiency in the hospital, you have a short length of stay — the correct length of stay — that goes to the bottom line. That’s No. 1,” he said, referring to NYU Langone again ranking No. 1 out of 115 comprehensive academic medical centers in quality and safety by Vizient.
He also noted that the system’s shift toward the ambulatory space has been cost effective in terms of its margin.
Additionally, he said the organization’s low administrative costs — due to its integration efforts — allowed NYU Langone to expand its workforce dramatically without changing the number of senior management full-time equivalent positions.
Regarding opportunities moving forward, he noted the influence of technology, and AI in decreasing costs and making care safer and higher quality.
“I think that’s true to a certain extent,” he said. “[But] healthcare is a very FTE-intense business. If you’re going to do it right, it’s not like you can have AI replace, or a robot replace, a nurse.
“So you have to be careful how you implement it. But there are a lot of things that AI can do to improve patient care and the back-office function, and improved technology leads to better diagnoses and better treatments.”
Another issue to watch, he said, revolves around the imperatives from the government and third-party payers about reimbursements.
“The most important thing is to push quality and safety,” Dr. Grossman said. “And if you can do that, I think you could be a winner. But it’s hard to do, and it’s a never-ending battle. But anything you can do to push quality, safety and efficiency.”
He also shared his advice for the next generation of healthcare leaders about balancing bold growth with fiscal responsibility in this era of constant disruption. He emphasized the importance of focus and not becoming distracted, as well as the importance of holding people accountable.
“You have to give them responsibility,” he said. “Hold people accountable. Set goals. And we set aspirational goals, and then monitor how they are in the process of achieving them. A lot of systems get distracted.”
He said it is also important to “be bold” and “do big things.”
“We did a lot of big things here,” Dr. Grossman said. “We did [full-tuition scholarships for medical students]. We built a three-year MD program. We built a very large ambulatory network.”
A surgical team at NYU Langone also performed the world’s first whole-eye and partial-face transplant in 2023.
“We were not risk averse,” Dr. Grossman said. “When we did Epic, we were among the first to do it, and we started early on. We did big things, and we weren’t afraid to make mistakes, but rather we were focused on our goal of being a truly world-class organization.”
And he expressed optimism about Dr. Kimmelman, who most recently served as director of the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center at NYU Langone, taking the helm.
“He has to chart his own course,” Dr. Grossman said. “He and [the board chair] are going to do a fantastic job, and our future is incredibly bright. I believe that we have the right structure, the right people can execute. They understand where we want to be, and we’re focused on that.”
