Montefiore Medical Center

Home for Chronic Invalids, Ca. 1890

The birth of Montefiore Hospital arose from a series of meetings held in early 1884 among representatives of New York City's synagogues, convened by Dr. Henry Pereira Mendes, to honor Sir Moses Montefiore on his forthcoming one-hundredth birthday. Out of these meetings, held in the rooms of Congregation Shearith Israel, the Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids, now the Montefiore Hospital, came into being at East 84th Street in Manhattan and accepted its first six patients on October 24, 1884,[3] Moses Montefiore's birthday. In its early years, it housed mostly patients with tuberculosis and other chronic illnesses.[4] After growing out of its original building, the hospital moved uptown to Broadway and West 138th Street in 1888.[4] In 1897, the Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids established and managed the Montefiore Home Country Sanitarium in Westchester County, which mostly housed early-stage consumptives.[5] The Montefiore Home for Chronic Invalids was renamed Montefiore Hospital for Chronic Diseases in 1901.[6]

It moved again, to its current location in the Bronx and was renamed Montefiore Home and Hospital for Chronic Diseases in 1913.[4] It was again renamed, as Montefiore Hospital for Chronic Diseases in 1920,[4] as Montefiore Hospital and Medical Center on October 11, 1964,[7] and as the Henry and Lucy Moses Division of Montefiore Medical Center in 1981 when it took over the daily operations of Einstein Hospital.[4]

Montefiore established the first Department of Social Medicine and the first home health care agency in the United States. In 2001, it established a pediatric hospital, the Children's Hospital at Montefiore. The hospital made international headlines when a series of operations successfully separated the conjoined twins Carl and Clarence Aguirre of the Philippines. The Montefiore Headache Center, the oldest headache center in the world, was ranked number one among New York Best Hospitals in 2006 by New York Magazine. The Emergency Department is among the five busiest in the United States. Its hospitals provide more than 85,000 inpatient stays per year, including more than 7,000 births. In 2007, it was among over 530 New York City arts and social service institutions to receive part of a $20 million grant from the Carnegie Corporation, which was made possible through a donation by New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.[8] On September 9, 2015, Montefiore assumed operational and financial oversight of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine from Yeshiva University.[9]

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, Montefiore Medical Center - Moses division became one of the first designated COVID centers, and the first to achieve in-house COVID-19 testing in New York City using the polymerase chain reaction.

• The first intracardiac pacemaker to treat Stokes-Adams seizures associated with complete heart block was inserted by cardiothoracic surgeons at Montefiore.[10]
• The association between endocarditis caused by Streptococcus bovis, since renamed Streptococcus gallolyticus, and colon cancer was discovered by researchers at Montefiore.[11]

Montefiore Health System consists of 14 hospitals; a primary and specialty care network of more than 180 locations across Westchester County, the lower Hudson Valley and the Bronx; an extended care facility; the Montefiore School of Nursing, and its own Albert Einstein College of Medicine.[12] In 2022, there were 1,530 staffed beds on its Moses Campus.[13]

• Moses Division ("Montefiore Hospital"): the 726-bed Moses Division is the mothership of the health system, located in the Norwood section, and includes the Greene Medical Arts Pavilion, an outpatient care and diagnostic testing facility.
• The Children's Hospital at Montefiore: the 106-bed Children's Hospital at Montefiore, also located in Norwood, is a nationally ranked children's hospital.
• Jack D. Weiler Hospital ("Einstein Hospital"): the 431-bed Jack D. Weiler Hospital ("Einstein Hospital")[14][15] is also operated by Montefiore and is located about 4 miles away, adjacent to the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Morris Park section.[16]
• Montefiore Wakefield Hospital: in 2008, Montefiore acquired Our Lady of Mercy Medical Center, a 360-bed hospital in the north Bronx that had been part of the Catholic health system, and which currently provides inpatient and outpatient primary and consultative care for communities of the Bronx. It was named the North Division of Montefiore, and then the Wakefield Division. It had 345 beds in 2022.[13]
• Burke Rehabilitation Hospital, an acute rehabilitation hospital located in White Plains, New York.
• White Plains Hospital: an affiliated hospital in White Plains, New York.
• Montefiore Mount Vernon Hospital in Mount Vernon, New York, 85 beds in 2022.[13]
• Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital in New Rochelle, New York, 301 beds in 2022.[13]
• Montefiore Nyack Hospital in Nyack, New York, 251 beds in 2022.[13]
• Montefiore-St. Lukes Cornwall Hospital in Newburgh, New York, 193 beds in 2022.[13]
• St. John's Riverside Hospital, an affiliate with one campus in Yonkers, New York and one campus in Dobbs Ferry, NY
• Montefiore Westchester Square: in March 2013, Montefiore acquired Westchester Square Medical Center, a community hospital that had operated under bankruptcy court protection for nearly seven years, renamed it Montefiore Westchester Square, closed the inpatient beds, and transformed it into a surgical center and free-standing emergency room. It had 140 beds in 2022.[13][17]
• Saint Joseph's Medical Center, an affiliated hospital in Yonkers, New York.[18]
• St. Vincent's Hospital Westchester, an affiliated hospital in Harrison, New York.[18]
• Montefiore Medical Specialists of Westchester, an outpatient facility in Scarsdale, New York.
• Montefiore St. Luke's Cornwall Outpatient Center in Cornwall, New York.
• Montefiore Medical Park: Montefiore Medical Park, an ambulatory care facility that contains offices for outpatient visits, full-time clinical practices, and administrative offices for clinical departments, is a short distance away from Einstein.

Montefiore is also home to the Montefiore Einstein Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Montefiore Einstein Center for Heart and Vascular Care, and the Montefiore Einstein Center for Transplantation. Montefiore also runs a residency Program in Social Medicine, one of the nation's oldest programs focused on preparing physicians to practice in underserved communities.

Montefiore is a primary clerkship site for third-year and fourth-year medical students at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Einstein offers joint residency programs between Montefiore Medical Center and Jacobi Medical Center in Internal medicine, child neurology, dermatology, emergency medicine, general surgery, neurology, obstetrics and gynecology, ophthalmology, orthopedic surgery, otolaryngology, plastic surgery, rehabilitation medicine, urology, and vascular surgery, as well as other sub-specialties. As one of the largest medical residency programs in the country, Montefiore provides postgraduate clinical training to more than 1,400 residents across 150 accredited residency and fellowship programs. Montefiore School of Nursing was also established in 2017 at New Rochelle Hospital and has since then graduated over 250 Registered Nurses.

Steven M. Safyer, M.D. was president and chief executive officer of Montefiore from 2008 to 2019. Prior to that, Dr. Safyer had been at Montefiore for 30 years, as a medical resident, an attending physician, and then vice president and chief medical officer.[22]

In November 2019, the board of trustees named Dr. Philip O. Ozuah as the chief executive officer of Montefiore beginning November 15, 2019. He had been the physician-in-chief of Montefiore Children's Hospital.[23]

• Albert Einstein College of Medicine
• Burke Rehabilitation Hospital
• Carl and Clarence Aguirre, conjoined twins who were surgically separated in the hospital
• Montefiore New Rochelle Hospital
• North Central Bronx Hospital
• Norwood News
• NYC Health + Hospitals/Jacobi (Jacobi Medical Center)
• Program for Jewish Genetic Health
• White Plains Hospital

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Montefiore Medical Center.

• Montefiore Medical Center — Department of Emergency Medicine
• Montefiore Medical Center's Official YouTube Channel
• Montefiore Primary Care & Social Internal Medicine Residency Program
• Montefiore Family Medicine Residency Program
• Montefiore Social Pediatric Residency Program