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At his investiture on October 29, 2007, former Dean and CEO of NYU Langone Health Robert I. Grossman, MD, declared that the institution “has all the ingredients to ascend to the rarefied status of a world-class, patient-centered, integrated academic health system.” Some saw that aspiration as so ambitious for an institution that was then debt plagued and poorly ranked that they dismissed it as unattainable. But Dean Grossman soon won over skeptics. Having served as chair of the for several years, he had strong feelings and clear ideas about NYU Langone’s untapped potential.

Dean Grossman quickly forged a productive and powerful partnership with Kenneth G. Langone, who for nearly a decade had established himself as a dynamic board hair. One year later, he sketched on a piece of graph paper what he called “a blueprint for transformation.” Key to Dean Grossman’s vision was making NYU Langone truly patient centered and integrating resources to better serve its tripartite mission: to care, to teach, to discover.

“By having a leader who is both dean and CEO, we have a huge competitive advantage,” Dean Grossman explains. “It takes us five minutes to make decisions other institutions may take five months to make.” With his fellow architect, Ken Langone, Dean Grossman reinvented the enterprise and transformed its culture. Staging a dramatic turnaround, they propelled NYU Langone to its current status as the No. 1 integrated academic health system in the United States, as rated by Vizient Inc. the nation’s largest healthcare performance improvement organization.

“I don’t know of anybody who has done more to make this institution and the world a better place than Bob Grossman,” says Langone. “We have a mutual admiration society.”

As a neuroradiologist, Dean Grossman has always prized the power of precision, and that conviction shaped his overarching strategy for continuous improvement. “I decided to manage solely on the basis of metrics and benchmarks,” he explains. When Epic, an electronic medical record system, was implemented in 2011, it provided a seamless online portal for patients and physicians, making NYU Langone the first healthcare institution in the New York metropolitan area to adopt such a system on an enterprise-wide basis.

Thanks to his vision, NYU Langone’s quality and safety metrics are now tracked by a signature suite of over 800 clinical dashboards. The institution’s rigorous self-monitoring explains how it has achieved the lowest mortality, length of stay, and readmission rates in the country, and why it has earned accolades from the nation’s leading arbiters of healthcare performance, including organizations like U.S. News & World Report, The Leapfrog Group, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and The Joint Commission. This hallmark of NYU Langone’s culture also accounts for our hospitals’ having earned the Magnet designation for excellence in nursing and quality patient care, and the Laura and Isaac Perlmutter Cancer Center being designated a Comprehensive Cancer Center by the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, its highest recognition of achievement.

Set on bringing its high-quality care to patients beyond Manhattan, in 2016 NYU Langone acquired Lutheran Medical Center in southwest Brooklyn. Within several years, NYU Langone Hospital—Brooklyn, as it was renamed, became one of the safest hospitals not only in New York City but in the nation. In 2019, NYU Langone extended its reach to Nassau County, merging with Winthrop University Hospital in Mineola, now NYU Langone Hospital—Long Island, an acquisition that enlarged the health system by 25 percent. Earlier this year, following the addition of numerous clinical services and improved key outcomes such as length of stay and readmission rates, Long Island Community Hospital became NYU Langone Hospital—Suffolk, launching a new chapter in its service to Suffolk County and the East End.

At the Manhattan campus, three additions have dramatically enhanced NYU Langone’s inpatient care and research capabilities: the Helen L. and Martin S. Kimmel Pavilion, New York City’s only inpatient clinical facility with exclusively private rooms; Hassenfeld Children’s Hospital, the city’s first new children’s hospital in nearly 15 years; and the Science Building, NYU Langone’s largest research facility, designed to promote interdisciplinary interactions among its research staff of 650.

As it has grown, NYU Langone has transformed its approach to medical education. In 2013, became the first nationally ranked medical school in the country to offer an accelerated three-year MD degree for select students, an initiative designed to ease their financial burden and launch their medical careers one year earlier. Five years later, NYU Grossman School of Medicine made history again, becoming the first top-ranked medical school to award full-tuition scholarships to all current and future students, a privilege that was later extended to NYU Langone’s second medical school, , founded in 2019.

From the beginning, Dean Grossman focused on the importance of elevating the patient experience. He was determined to make NYU Langone a place where patients feel like guests, not only safe and comfortable, but also welcome. A patient once told him how impressed he was by the quality of NYU Langone’s care. “But what he cherished most,” Dean Grossman recalls, “were the human interactions. The entire care team greeted him with a smile and asked him about his life. By treating him with respect and friendship, they created the kind of warm environment that is essential for optimal healing.”

An equal priority has been turning NYU Langone into a clinical trailblazer. Among many others, Dean Grossman recruited two surgeons whose groundbreaking achievements have made the institution internationally renowned for its medical advances: Eduardo D. Rodriguez, MD, DDS, the Helen L. Kimmel Professor of Reconstructive Plastic Surgery and chair of the , and Robert A. Montgomery, MD, DPhil, director of the NYU Langone Transplant Institute and chair of the . In 2015, Dr. Rodriguez led a team of surgeons in performing the most extensive face transplant in history. In 2021, Dr. Montgomery, a heart transplant recipient himself, led a team that performed the first investigational transplant of a kidney grown in a genetically altered pig into the body of a brain-dead patient, advancing the potential use of an alternative supply of organs for lifesaving transplants.

Medical milestones alone do not account for NYU Langone’s preeminence in healthcare. Dean Grossman has long held that the true measure of a health system lies in the exceptional care it delivers day in and day out for all patients. The commitment to make excellence a routine occurrence explains, in large part, why U.S. News & World Report recently ranked NYU Langone No. 1 in the nation in four specialties (more than any other institution): neurology and neurosurgery (fourth year in a row); pulmonology and lung surgery (second year in a row); cardiology, heart, and vascular surgery; and geriatrics.

“I define optimism as the conviction that you can do what you set out to do,” Dean Grossman says. Beyond all expectations and against all odds, he has delivered on every promise he made 18 years ago, when he and Ken Langone teamed up to make “world-class” a reality.