Departmental Scope and Initiatives

The Department has grown to encompass anesthesia services at The Mount Sinai Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital of Queens, City Hospital Center at Elmhurst, Queens Hospital Center, and the James Peters Veteran's Medical Center Hospital Center. The Department that has slightly greater than 100 faculty and 100 housestaff, 15 certified registered nurse anesthetists, and administers approximately 50,000 anesthetics annually at The Mount Sinai Hospital alone. This caseload includes approximately 3,200 cardiothoracic procedures, 2,500 neurosurgical operations, 4,500 cases involving pain management, 10,000 spinal and epidural procedures (including greater than 5,000 obstetrical cases), 6,000 cases managed with peripheral nerve blocks, and more than 9,000 anesthetics administered to ambulatory surgical patients.

The Department was among the earliest adopters of electronic anesthesia records, also known as anesthesia information management systems (AIMS). In January 1990, the cardiothoracic and liver transplant OR's began using the forerunner of the current system. By 1998, all of Mount Sinai's operating rooms had AIMS, and by 2004, this was extended to all obstetrical, endoscopic, and outlying anesthetizing locations. By the mid-1990's, research projects used the Mount Sinai AIMS to investigate the predictors of pulse oximetry failure in thousands of anesthetic procedures⁵, as well as a joint project with St. Luke's-Roosevelt Medical Center demonstrating the intraoperative hemodynamic predictors of adverse outcomes in coronary bypass surgery.⁴ The 1990's were also remarkable for the recruitment of the informatics expert, Marina Krol, PhD

The 2000's saw a great expansion in the number of research, quality and administrative projects from the informatics group. The Department was the first to demonstrate how an AIMS could be used to enhance practice metrics⁶ and physician productivity.⁷ Greater than twenty-five manuscripts, ten book chapters, various invited publications have emerged from the group. The Surgical Care Improvement Project and other major perioperative quality measures assess information drawn directly from the AIMS. The informatics group also created the first surgical patient tracking system at Mount Sinai in 2004 to enhance communication among staff and family members.

The Department comprises a large general surgery and subspecialty core, but also includes eight divisions each with a research agenda. These divisions (cardiothoracic, liver transplantation, neuroanesthesia, obstetric, orthopaedic/regional, pediatric, pain management, and critical care) are also inextricably linked to the educational activities of the Department, which encompass undergraduate, graduate and continuing medical education.