North Shore University Hospital is a tertiary and quaternary care teaching hospital on Long Island and serves as the flagship hospital of the Northwell Health system. The hospital specializes in complex care, including neurosurgery, transplantation, trauma, cardiac surgery, and critical care services.
What was the impetus behind the Petrocelli Surgical Pavilion expansion, and how is it changing patient care?
Ultimately, it was about planning for the future. We have an aging population, and predictions suggest that by 2030, one in five Americans will be over 65. We’re treating increasingly older patients with chronic illnesses, and hospitals are going to be caring for more high-acuity patients requiring highly complex care. That meant we needed to invest in larger, more technologically advanced operating rooms and expand our critical care capacity.
The Petrocelli Surgical Pavilion, which opened in February 2024, added 18 new operating rooms, including three hybrid suites equipped with CT scanners and advanced radiologic technology, along with 132 new ICU rooms. Each ICU room includes a 54-inch smart TV, digital whiteboards displaying the care team and goals of care, and AI-enabled smart cameras that support virtual check-ins, family visitation, and language interpretation services. We’re proud to be a CMS five-star hospital, and while it’s difficult to isolate exactly how much of that comes from these technologies, they provide a strong foundation for continued improvement.
Where are AI and digital technologies making the biggest operational impact inside the hospital?
A major step for us was opening a hospital operations center in November 2024, which functions as the air traffic control center for an 800-plus-bed hospital with 29 operating rooms, multiple procedural areas, and a busy emergency department. We actually spent time at JetBlue’s headquarters studying how they manage highly complex operations before designing it.
The next phase is incorporating AI into that operation. We want to predict delays before they happen by identifying bottlenecks in real time and detecting patient deterioration earlier, before it becomes clinically obvious. That’s also one of the reasons we’re transitioning our electronic medical record system — to allow more real-time data analysis that can support AI-driven decision-making and operational efficiency in the future.
Has the rise of ambulatory and outpatient care changed the role of flagship hospitals like North Shore?
It absolutely has, and we’ve been planning for it over the last decade. Across Northwell’s system, we’ve regionalized care so different hospitals focus on different specialties. North Shore University Hospital, as the flagship quaternary care hospital on Long Island, focuses on highly complex areas like neurosurgery, trauma surgery, transplantation, and cardiac surgery. Long Island Jewish Medical Center focuses more heavily on cancer and women’s health.
What we’re increasingly seeing is care moving closer to home. Procedures that once required tertiary hospitals are now being handled in community hospitals, and things once treated in community hospitals are now being managed at home. As technology improves and care becomes safer and more efficient, tertiary hospitals are becoming increasingly focused on the most complex patients and procedures. Ultimately, we believe patients achieve the best outcomes when care is delivered as close to home as possible.
What advantages and challenges come with operating at Northwell’s scale across New York?
One of the biggest advantages of scale is the ability to build a coordinated system of care. We can make sure primary care happens close to where people live while ensuring the most complex care is concentrated in centers with the highest expertise and best outcomes. We also operate our own ambulance and air medical systems, which allow us to move patients efficiently throughout the region.
At North Shore alone, we receive between 400 and 500 patient transfers every month from hospitals both within and outside the system. That infrastructure allows us to move resources and patients quickly to wherever they can receive the highest level of care. At the same time, operating at that scale requires constant coordination and standardization across a very large network of hospitals and physician offices.
What are the biggest operational pressures hospitals are facing right now?
We’re an extremely busy hospital, and at times we simply have more patients than beds. That means we’re intensely focused on efficiency — diagnosing patients rapidly, treating them appropriately, and moving them safely through the hospital so we can continue bringing patients up from the emergency department. A major part of that effort is using the hospital operations center to prioritize resources and tests more effectively.
Some of the overcrowding we experience is also driven by broader issues within the healthcare system, including hospital closures in the region and patients relying on emergency departments because they lack access to primary care. In New York, we’re also very high utilizers of testing, so we spend a great deal of time ensuring testing is appropriate and determining whether some services can safely be scheduled outside the hospital instead.
How is North Shore addressing staffing pressures and burnout?
We’ve been relatively fortunate with staffing compared with some other parts of the country. We operate an internal staffing agency that allows nurses and providers to work across multiple sites within the system, which gives us flexibility when certain areas need additional support. That’s been incredibly effective for us.
We’ve also invested heavily in employee engagement and benefits, and we’re looking carefully at care models that create more redundancy so providers don’t become overwhelmed. I still practice as a nephrologist, so I understand personally how difficult poor patient outcomes can be for providers. Building systems that identify deterioration earlier and better support clinicians ultimately helps reduce burnout.
How does North Shore decide where innovation spending and digital investment truly matter?
That’s something we constantly wrestle with, especially within a large health system where you want innovations to eventually scale across the organization. At North Shore, because we’re the flagship quaternary care facility, there are certain programs and technologies we’ll invest in here first because they’re unique to this hospital.
The way we evaluate those investments is fairly disciplined. First, the innovation has to improve quality and patient care. Second, it should improve the patient experience. Third, it should ideally bring financial value as well. We also look for partners that are flexible, because every health system operates differently, and we prioritize solutions that are scalable so that if they work here, we can eventually expand them across a broader part of the system.
