Agreement between South Nassau and Mount Sinai finalized

After more than a year of negotiations and regulatory hurdles, the partnership between South Nassau Communities Hospital in Oceanside and Mount Sinai Health System in Manhattan has been finalized, executives for both health care institutions will announce Tuesday.

As part of the agreement, Mount Sinai will provide $120 million to aid expansion of South Nassau’s campus and services. This includes plans for a new four-story addition in Oceanside with an expanded emergency department, new intensive care beds and surgical suites.

Executives on both sides said the partnership blends a major academic research center with South Nassau’s community-based medicine on Long Island’s South Shore. Together, the institutions can offer clinical trials and a range of medical services that patients previously had to travel elsewhere on the Island or into Manhattan to receive, they said.

“Mount Sinai is a world-class institution with a leading medical school, and this partnership will allow our patients to have access to some of the top physicians and most advanced treatments available,” Richard J. Murphy, South Nassau’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “It also will help South Nassau reach the next level in our role as a growing regional medical center.”

South Nassau is a 455-bed institution that has served Long Island’s South Shore since 1928. The cash from Mount Sinai will help lay the foundation for the hospital’s five-year master facility plan, which calls for greater expansion and increasing its footprint in the region.

Affiliation talks were first announced in May 2017, when executives on both sides of the partnership said they intended to explore a formal agreement that would align medical services, management and governance of the institutions.

South Nassau Communities Hospital officially became the Long Island flagship health care institution in the Mount Sinai system after a unanimous vote by the Oceanside hospital’s board of trustees in January.

“All of the regulatory approvals have been completed,” said Dr. Arthur Klein, president of the Mount Sinai Health Network.

Approvals of the new partnership have been made by the New York State Department of Health, the New York State Attorney General and the New York State Department of Education.

What has yet to be decided, Klein said in an interview, is how the name of both institutions will be reflected in a renaming of South Nassau. New naming ultimately will reflect South Nassau’s status as the Long Island flagship of Mount Sinai, executives said.

“We are working cooperately with South Nassau and a consulting firm [on renaming] that reflects the legacy of South Nassau as well as the alignment with Mount Sinai,” Klein said. “We are doing this in a way that is collaborative.”

In a similar affiliation between NYU and the former Winthrop-University Hospital, a formalized agreement resulted in the Mineola institution being renamed NYU Winthrop Hospital.

During the past 10 months, administrators at both institutions have been collaborating on aligning Mount Sinai’s academic, clinical and research expertise with South Nassau’s community-based system of care, Klein added.

Mount Sinai specialists already have begun collaborating with physicians at South Nassau to provide more specialized, advanced care, Klein said.

Approval has been granted by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education for a new internal medicine residency program on the South Nassau campus, which will train doctors in that key area of primary care, Klein said.