COMMUNICATED: A Stronger Future for the Community - Rooted in Tradition and Built on Partnership

By Mitchell Katz, MD, President and CEO, NYC Health + Hospitals, and Svetlana Lipyanskaya, Incoming CEO, NYC Health + Hospitals/Maimonides

We know that Brooklyn is a borough defined by its people – families whose faith, generosity, and resilience make up a community unlike any other in the world. For more than a century, Maimonides Health has stood in the community as a trusted home for care rooted in Jewish values and guided by the principle of chesed. We know this personally, as Brooklyn was, for each of us, our childhood home.

Now, there is an opportunity to strengthen that foundation and secure Maimonides’ future. If Maimonides joins NYC Health + Hospitals, we can ensure that Maimonides continues to serve as an anchor in Brooklyn for high-quality specialty and community care. This is important for all of us at NYC Health + Hospitals — and especially to the two of us — as a chance to give back to the borough and community that helped shape us.

Together, we can safeguard Maimonides’ cultural and religious identity. NYC Health + Hospitals is committed to continuing respect for long-established practices that Brooklyn’s Orthodox Jewish communities have come to expect—from kosher meal service and specialized end-of-life care to policies around Shabbat observance and access to rabbinic consultation. Input from members of the community will continue to be critical to ensure that cultural standards are met, along with clinical ones.

Joining our health care system will stabilize and strengthen Maimonides’ operations and expand the outstanding clinical care it already delivers for the community. When the transaction is finalized, Maimonides stands to gain access to more than $2.2 billion in state grant funding over five years, including $500 million for badly-needed capital improvements, including the modernization of Maimonides’ labor and delivery department and adoption of a critical state-of-the-art electronic health record system that will enhance the patient experience and reduce costs.

Maimonides will also be able to access a higher Medicaid reimbursement rate, adding tens of millions of dollars in annual revenue – all of it invested in Maimonides.

At a time when federal budget cuts pose an existential threat to safety net hospitals across New York and the country, this amounts to an unprecedented amount of support over the coming years for Maimonides and the community. For patients, this support will mean expanded access to coordinated, high-quality care in every specialty – from maternal health to cardiac care to