When COVID-19 hit the United States back in January of 2020, New York was one of the first cities to really feel the pressure. Hospitals had to quickly adapt to a new set of working conditions as the virus spread rapidly. It was truly a race against time in an environment where the rules kept changing as we learned more and more about how COVID-19 was transmitted.

Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York is the largest teaching hospital in the United States with over 50,000 students and staff. Managing a global health crisis in this type of facility comes with a special set of challenges. A teaching hospital is a place where people are frequently experiencing things for the first time. They are looking for leadership in every respect because experience is still being acquired.

Today our Managing Board Member Christoph Zindel interviews Dr. Zahi Fayad, Professor of Radiology and Medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. As a researcher, he is one of the world leaders in the development and use of multimodality cardiovascular imaging.

As part of the leadership team at Mount Sinai, Dr. Zahi Fayad talks about the unique challenges that he faced from the perspective of a research hospital. It wasn’t only a challenge to manage the safety of individuals at such a large institution, but an additional dilemma concerning research funding loomed. Dr. Zahi Fayad gives us a glimpse into those early winter months of 2020 in New York.

Some Questions asked:

·      Can you describe the development in New York during the past months and weeks? (1:27)

·      How did you manage the health of the employees? (7:36)

·      Will your staff continue working from home, and are there consequences to that? (14:26)

·      Are there innovations in medical science that have been triggered or even accelerated by the pandemic? (17:02)

·      How important is global collaboration during the pandemic? (27:43)

·      What is needed to manage a crisis? (32:14)

What You’ll Learn in this Episode:

·      What it felt like when the COVID-19 positive patients started being admitted (4:34)

·      How the research hospital adapted when the crisis hit (8:29)

·      How the hospital was supported financially as they shifted their research procedures (10:26)

·      The future importance of “wearables” in medical care (21:48)

·      How Mount Sinai first got into COVID-19 research, months before the virus began to spread (28:09)

Connect with Dr. Zahi Fayad:

·      LinkedIn

Resources:

Bio- Icahn School of Medicine Mt. Sinai

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