Tisch Hospital

Chief of Medical Service: Daniel I. Shine, M.D.

Overview

Tisch Hospital is a highly acclaimed, 730-bed acute-care general hospital, which each year admits about 35,000 patients from the community and around the world. One of the four main teaching hospitals of NYU School of Medicine, Tisch is a major training site for students, residents, fellows, and visiting physicians in each of the subspecialties of medicine.

Tisch Hospital was founded in 1882 as the New York Postgraduate Hospital. In 1948 the Postgraduate Hospital merged with New York University Medical Center to form University Hospital. In 1963 University Hospital was rebuilt on its present site, and in 1990 it was renamed Tisch Hospital after one of its prominent and very generous benefactors, Laurence Tisch.

Today Tisch Hospital is routinely rated among the best general hospitals in the region, offering a wide array of patient-care programs and leading-edge diagnostic and treatment services. The excellence of Tisch is rooted in its large cadre of academic clinicians who combine clinical practice with an intense commitment to teaching and clinical research.

The Medical Service

Daniel I. Shine, M.D. is Chief of Medical Service. The service handles approximately 8,200 admissions per year, with a high acuity index.

Its facilities include 170 acute-care beds, as well as eight Medical Intensive Care Unit beds, six Coronary Care Unit beds, and 16 step-down beds for severely ill patients requiring high acuity care but not ICU admission.

The service also comprises an acute cardiac unit for patients who require specialized cardiac care, and a hematology/oncology unit for patients with a wide range of hematologic diseases and malignancies. A pulmonary unit designed to provide specialized care to patients with severe or challenging pulmonary diseases is currently under development.

The Medical Service at Tisch is renowned for its innovative clinical programs in a large number of areas. The following is an overview of the cardiology programs at Tisch.

• The Cardiac Arrhythmia Program - under the direction of Dr. Larry Chinitz, provides state-of-the-art treatment for all cardiac arrhythmias, with a focus on device therapy and ablation techniques. Tisch is a leader in the New York area in ablative therapy for atrial fibrillation, and is initiating an ablative program for ventri-cular arrhythmias.
• The Heart Failure Program - under the direction of Dr. Ulrich Jorde, offers specialized care for patients with refractory heart failure, including the latest in ambulatory intotropic support and biventricular pacing to improve heart failure symptoms. Also under development is a program in left ventricular assist devices (LVADs).
• The Lipid Treatment Program - under the direction of Dr. Edward A. Fisher, provides consultative care for the management of lipid disorders. The Lipid Treatment Group offers expertise in lipid management as well as access to investigational agents.
• The Acute Coronary Intervention Program - led by Dr. Frederick Feit, provides 24/7 access to the latest techniques in interventional cardiology for acute coronary syndromes and myocardial infarction. The recruitment of Dr. Judith Hochman in 2003 brought to the Coronary Intervention Program a distinguished international authority who has done pioneering work in defining optimal strategies for the management of cardiogenic shock.

Clinical programs in other subspecialties of medicine include:

• Pulmonary: The Interventional Bronchoscopy Program employs leading-edge techniques to diagnose and treat tumors and infiammatory conditions of the lung.
• Hematology/Oncology: The Bone Marrow Transplant Unit, under the direction of Dr. Perry Cook, provides transplantation options for refractory leukemias, lymphomas, and other malignancies. A new unit is being developed to house an expanding allogeneic transplant program.
• Rheumatology: In collaboration with the Hospital for Joint Diseases, the Rheumatology Division is expanding its program development at Tisch. The hospital is also the site of the division's Psoriatic Arthritis Program, developed in conjunction with the Department of Dermatology.
• General Internal Medicine:A Hospitalist Program, staffed by full-time academic hospitalists, was started at Tisch in 2004 to provide optimal patient care as well as to facilitate clinical research in such areas as health outcomes and medical informatics.

The Medical Service at Tisch is experiencing dynamic growth not only in its clinical programs but also in its clinical research and educational activities. An invigorated Clinical Trials Unit is facilitating recruitment and implementation of clinical trials.

An effort is also under way to create a Web-based registry of patients organized by disease characteristics that will expedite recruitment of patients from our vast network of office-based practitioners.

The educational programs at Tisch run the gamut from undergraduate instruction to advanced fellowship training. Ten third-year students and four to eight fourth-year students (subinterns) train in the Medical Service at Tisch every month, while approximately 20 house staff rotate through the service and its intensive care units and subspecialty services.

Clinical fellows in each division of the Department of Medicine provide consultative services at Tisch under the guidance of subspecialty attendings. Advanced (fourth-year) fellows receive training here in many areas of highly specialized care.