Leadership

Dr. Paul Goldiner had been recruited to Mount Sinai in 1992 during Joel Kaplan's tenure as chair. When Kaplan left Mount Sinai in 1997 to become Dean of the University of Louisville, Goldiner, the former Chair of Anesthesiology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, became the Acting Chair. Following a national search, Goldiner was named Chair of the Department in 1999. Goldiner was installed as the second Horace W. Goldsmith Professor of Anesthesiology at Medical School Convocation in 2000.

The years of Dr. Goldiner's tenure as the leader of the Department of Anesthesiology (1997-2004) were a period of great clinical and academic growth for the Department. Residency positions rebounded following a resurgence of interest in anesthesiology, concurrent with an expansion in operating room volume. The Department founded an ambulatory practice in Westchester County and established office-based practices. The housestaff training program became the first in the nation to educate residents in office-based anesthesia practice and safety. Dr. Goldiner also assumed leadership of anesthesia services at The Mount Sinai Hospital of Queens.

While the Department had obtained its first full scale mannequin simulator in 1994, it was under the leadership of Goldiner that the newly created Anesthesia Simulation Center opened its doors in 2002. Led by Dr. Adam Levine, and later certified by the American Society of Anesthesiologists, Dr. Goldiner's vision of advanced education created what remains the premier human simulation facility in the region. (See Education and Human Patient Simulation)

Goldiner retired in 2004 and David L. Reich was named the new Chair. No stranger to Mount Sinai, Reich received his medical degree from Jefferson Medical College. Following two years of surgical residency, Reich entered the Mount Sinai anesthesiology residency program, served as Chief Resident and then completed a fellowship in Cardiothoracic Anesthesia. He joined the faculty in 1987 and three years later was named Co-Director of Cardiothoracic Anesthesia, the position he held until being promoted to Chair of the Department.

Reich is internationally recognized for leadership in cardiothoracic anesthesia and medical informatics. He also is involved with several national and international professional societies, and in 2009, he completed a term on the Board of Directors of the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists. He is an associate editor of the definitive textbook Cardiac Anesthesia, and the immediate past editor of the journal Seminars in Cardiothoracic and Vascular Anesthesia. Recently, Reich represented the Society of Cardiovascular Anesthesiologists as the sole anesthesiologist on a multidisciplinary national task force that published new practice guidelines for the diagnosis and management of patients with thoracic aortic disease.²

An active researcher, Reich has conducted investigations on topics ranging from the neuropsychological outcomes following thoracic aortic surgery³ to the outcome effects of intraoperative hemodynamics and hemodynamic monitoring.⁴ He has published extensively in the field of cardiac and thoracic anesthesiology and was among the first to demonstrate the benefit of using electronic medical records for large-scale retrospective investigations examining the association of intraoperative hemodynamic abnormalities with adverse postoperative outcomes. Reich is also active in the emerging field of medical informatics. He is a member of the International Organization for Terminology in Anesthesia of the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, which aims to develop worldwide standards for anesthesia terminology for electronic patient records. His continuing research in this area demonstrates the uses of electronic patient records for outcomes research, enhancing quality of patient care, and practice management. At Mount Sinai, he is using informatics to identify patients who require more intensive pain management during hospitalization.