NYU Langone Health recently opened a state-of-the-art $170 million outpatient radiology hub in adjacent former Sears and Bloomingdale’s stores, leaders announced Tuesday.
The 260,000-square-foot ambulatory care center also features 30 other clinical specialties including cardiology, pediatrics and pulmonology. This is the largest such center on Long Island, employing more than 800 doctors and other staffers expected to care for 400,000 patients annually, NYU said.
Radiology occupies about a quarter of the four-floor building. NYU employs roughly 280 members of the specialty, and Ambulatory Care Garden City will utilize a mix of radiologists working at the facility and off-site. Department of Radiology Chair Michael P. Recht, MD, said he’s excited about how the facility will improve productivity and staff collaboration.
“I love that we’re able to develop a workflow that is much more efficient for the technologists, for the patients and for the radiologists,” he told Radiology Business. “A lot of times, we work in buildings that were not designed for our equipment and the current volume that we deal with. So, being able to optimize workflow both to make it more patient-centric, as well as more technologist-centric, is very exciting. We are doing these multispecialty, outpatient centers so the physicians on-site have that interaction, which is a big positive as well. And that makes it more convenient for the patient, who can see their doc and get their imaging at the same site, often on the same day.”
A view inside one of the imaging suites at the NYU Langone Ambulatory Care Garden City center.
The center is stationed in downtown Garden City, New York, and incorporates 260 exam rooms. On-site radiology services include MRI, ultrasound-guided procedures and X-rays. ACR has designated the facility as a Comprehensive Breast Imaging Center, also offering bone density testing, biopsies, digital mammography and breast MR, CT and PET. Nurse navigators help patients to deal with callbacks and ensure they don’t run into any issues, while private dressing rooms for these services increase comfort.
"It really restores that integration that we used to have and that we've lost a little bit as we've geographically spread out and radiology has gone other places.”
–Michael P. Recht, MD, Chair, Department of Radiology, NYU Langone Health
Designers tapped nurses and technologists across multiple modalities to aid in designing the radiology space.
“We all sat in a room with the architects and talked about what's important for patients,” Recht said. “We often forget that aspect, but the technologist is such a key part of what we do. Especially now with the workforce issues we are facing, we want the technologist to be comfortable and to let them help in envisioning these spaces.”
The radiology chair noted that NYU had previously closed an imaging center site on Long Island and is moving its work to this facility. Volume also has increased in recent years and the ambulatory center allows the organization to take on additional exams.
“We are busy enough that we're opening up more hours and extending into the evenings going until 10 p.m. in some modalities to allow us to handle the volume that we have,” he said.
Recht also highlighted the importance of having radiologists on-site and able to collaborate with other specialties or speak with patients. Members of the specialty will rotate in and out of the ambulatory center while also spending time working at home and at the NYU Langone Hospital–Long Island, which is 1 mile away.
“We always talk about not wanting to be invisible radiologists. Often you can pop up if there's a question, or the doc can come down to the reading room,” he said. “It really restores that integration that we used to have and that we've lost a little bit as we've geographically spread out and radiology has gone other places.”
Marty Stempniak has covered healthcare since 2012, with his byline appearing in the American Hospital Association's member magazine, Modern Healthcare and McKnight's. Prior to that, he wrote about village government and local business for his hometown newspaper in Oak Park, Illinois. He won a Peter Lisagor and Gold EXCEL awards in 2017 for his coverage of the opioid epidemic.