One of the Department of Anesthesiology’s senior faculty members, Ralph Slepian, M.D., Professor of Clinical Anesthesiology, Weill Cornell Medical College, and Attending Anesthesiologist, NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital, was recently appointed to the positions of Vice President for Medical Affairs and Associate Chief Medical Officer for NewYork-Presbyterian. Appointed on January 5 by Richard S. Liebowitz, M.D., Senior Vice President & Chief Medical Officer of NewYork-Presbyterian, the new position expands on work Dr. Slepian has been doing for the Hospital and the Department for a number of years.
Dr. Slepian’s new roles carry a number of responsibilities. In leading the medical staff office, he will help oversee the process through which physician credentialing occurs. This is important to make sure newly-hired physicians are appropriately credentialed and are in compliance with hospital policies and regulations as well as ensuring the current physicians’ skills and credentials are kept up-to-date. Dr. Slepian will also have a leadership role in the Hospital’s Making Care Better initiative. This is a global initiative involving communication, multidisciplinary rounds, care coordination, patient safety and quality occurring across all of the NewYork-Presbyterian campuses. Another element of the program uses evidence-based medicine to create and refine treatment pathways to insure that patient care is improved and those improvements are maintained. “Every patient should be treated the same, no matter which team cares for the patient,” Dr. Slepian observed. The Making Care Better program seeks to ensure that goal comes to pass – both by giving physicians improved guidelines to raise the quality of care, but also from studies and analysis that provide the basis for new and refined quality improvement processes.
Dr. Slepian pointed to his years as a member of the Department of Anesthesiology as a very important element in giving him the experience to take on this new role. During his twenty-five-plus years in Anesthesiology, he took on a series of expanding leadership roles and has been leading efforts to improve individual patient care, the Department, and the larger systems of care delivery during this time. The Department of Anesthesiology is a place “where you interact with many people and continually learn and grow,” he noted. As Vice President for Medical Affairs and Associate Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Slepian is looking forward to getting to know the other campuses of the NewYork-Presbyterian system. His goal is to help the Hospital continually improve. One sign of this would be to rise above its current #6 position in the U.S. News rankings. And while high rankings always help raise morale, Dr. Slepian notes that the real significance of national rankings is that they are a visible sign that the NewYork-Presbyterian and Weill Cornell are “delivering the best possible patient care and have a reputation for it.” This is a goal Dr. Slepian and the entire Hospital and Department are pursuing every day.