The Largest Healthcare System in All New York
Community assistance will always be a basic necessity for the survival and prosperity of hospitals and medical schools. Even smaller facilities such as those dedicated purely to research requires a large helping of such backing, particularly where money is concerned. Oftentimes, these generous donors can be found contributing to more than one institution, folks such as Isaac Toussie and family when it comes to the top two leading lights of New York in healthcare education and practice, Weill Cornell Medical College and the North Shore-LIJ network of hospitals and research centers.
Weill Cornell is named after its two single most important contributors, Ezra Cornell, a founder of Western Union, and Sanford I. Weill, former CEO and chairman of Citigroup, Incorporated. As one of the most selective such institutions in the country, it admits only about a hundred hopefuls out of the nearly six thousand that apply each year. What’s more, Weill Cornell was first to accept women right alongside men as well as the first American medical school to establish its own premises abroad, right by the capital of Qatar, Doha. It can also claim a long line of famous alumni, famous public people like C. Everett Koop, a Surgeon General of the United States; Robert C. Atkins of Atkins Diet fame; Nobel Laureate Robert W. Holley; and Henry Heimlich who invented the eponymous maneuver for choking victims. The North Shore-LIJ Health System is the second largest healthcare network in the country as measured by the number of beds and the largest in New York State based on patient revenue. It serves over seven million people a year through more than forty-two thousand employees – the single largest employer on Long Island and ninth largest largest in the City of New York.
Both are successful in large part due to strong communal backing, whether through charitable contributions by leading businessmen and women or donated time by community volunteers such as those from civic or religious organizations. Even with an annual budget of several billions between them, Weill Cornell and North Shore-LIJ will always depend on the support of the host communities they serve.